Farming for Self-Sufficiency

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The tongue: soak in boiled, spiced, cold brine (with the silverside if you like). Leave it there for six days. Bake it in the oven. Skin it. Pot it and cover with clarified butter and/or suet as for potted beef.

Our ox keeps us lavishly in beef for a year.

MUTTON

We kill two or three sheep a year, and now that we have got the deep freeze it is a very easy business indeed. I shoot the sheep with the .22 (in Africa we used to stun him with the back of an axe), lay him on his left side and stick him just below and behind the ear. One should then break his neck by grasping his lower jaw with one's left hand, placing right hand over his poll and jerking upwards. I omit this part of the little ceremony because, with the .22 bullet, he is already as dead as mutton.

I then skin his legs and throat out, open his throat, tie off his weasand and then haul him up on the gamble.

Finishing skinning him (and as much as possible of this should be done with the fist-not with the knife: the hide should not be cut, nor should the meat, and large areas of fat and flesh should not be left sticking to the hide), I rip his belly from the brisket upwards, remove the caul, cut the bung loose and tie it off, remove the bladder and hulk the sheep—that is haul out his stomachs and guts. As you do so you must pull his food pipe through his diaphragm. Then split the breast bone, remove the pluck (liver, lights and heart), wipe him out inside with a clean, warm, wet cloth and put in a stick called a 'back set', which is to spread him open and let the air in. The large intestine can be used for sausage casings.

Hang him a week, but of course you can begin to eat bits and pieces before that—the liver of course the first day. In Africa I used to kill a sheep in the dry season, when the days were as hot as hell but the nights were freezing. I would hang the meat outside at night out of leopard reach, bring it in early in the morning and wrap it up in many sheets of newspaper. Like this I could keep it for a month.

While on the subject of Africa, I must here mention biltong. Biltong is salted and dried strips of buck meat or beef and it is almost worshipped by South Africans. Living in the back-veld of South West Africa, as I used to do, biltong formed an important part of my diet. If I shot a gemsbok or a kudu I would turn a very large part of it into biltong. I have made it in Wales since then, in fact I made some last year, out of beef, and it has been perfectly successful. The only drawback is you need prime cuts really; biltong made from odd bits of scrag end is not really much good.

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