Braai

Braai. South African BBQ is carried out in a different fashion.

No charcoal briquets. From what I've seen there is usually a braai area somewhere at a house which is basically like a clearing on a concrete surface. It is somewhat enclosed...almost like a fume hood in a wet chemical lab. I don't really know how they start the fire. I see logs of wood at the start..go off have a beer (or glass of wine) and hang out...and come back and see the wood magically transformed into uniformly red hot coals. From what I saw, it is mostly men who do the braai-ing. I went to my client's house for dinner with his family. One of my trainers was with me and they had an assortment of meats (lamb, chicken, boerwurst). My client's son was the one who created the coals...but the actual braai-ing of the meat turned into a father-son activity.

Over an even layer of coals, a frame is suspended to hold the meat. It reminds me of those Ronco roaster commercials..."Set it, and forget it!"...where they use a similar frame to hold fish, steaks, or anything you don't want to impale for roasting. The frame is laid over the coals with the use of bricks or anything else heat resistant. Like BBQs in the US, one must experiment and gain experience to understand how to cook the meat. And so we saw my client coaching his son from time to time. We sat outside, keeping warm by staying close to the coals, drinking wine, and shooting the breeze. Did my client learn his style of braai from his father? (don't remember) Do you ever braai some more exotic meats like kudu or springbok (yes). Springbok is apparently very stringy and so that must have been the reason I've only had it stewed. How do kudu or gemsbok compare to springbok? (better) What goes into boerwurst? (Everyone has different recipes and if you find someone with a good recipe...you stick with them) How come biltong is so soft? (biltong is beef jerky in SA...and it is softer because it is not dried out as much as jerky). Apparently, biltong was developed over time when the boers (South African farmers) had to fight off invading armies. It doesn't spoil in a relatively mild climate like South Africa but probably wouldn't do so well in a really humid, hot environment.

When the meat is done, we go inside and eat together with the women of the household. My client has 3 children and they are all in different phases of growing up in the high school/college years. In talking to them at the dinner table, it seems as if they are still sheltered to some extent...much like I was when I went off to college and even when I started working. While enjoying the food, we embark upon conversation reflecting the state of South Africa. South Africa used to be a net producer of food and now it is mostly imported. There are different cultures in South Africa and their differences sometimes cause friction. The eldest daughter remarks that she has few if any black friends and that she is a little scared of them. I can understand the fear as she has not had much exposure to them. Her remarks take me back to a conversation with a black South African consultant-in-training. He recalled some of his past back to days where he hated white people partially because he had not known any of them. Fortunately, he was able to get past his earlier views when he got to know white people and now he able to help bridge gaps because he is comfortable with both. He even makes white people feel comfortable around him because of his manner...as evidenced by my client's level of comfort with him. Not having spent much time with black people in South Africa, I can see the viewpoints of white people about how the country has deteriorated and yet I know there are always different sides. Even my client characterizes much of the history of South Africa as a history of exploitation by various countries with much violence. South Africa itself is much like America in that it contains many cultures. In both countries, there is a self-imposed segregation because people of different ethnicities like to stick together.

Sometimes we in America like to consider our culture to be a melting pot of cultures. This is true in that people of different ethnicities are exposed to different cultures regularly and embrace them to some extent. We have names like twinkies or bananas (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) and I'm sure they exist for other ethnic groups as well. I've seen my share of black guys that act more white and I've seen my share of white guys that want to be asian. And yet, the color of our skin still seems to be a good reason to run in packs. I remember that Slope Day at Cornell was often a very self-segregated event at times. If you have no idea what Slope Day is...or was...

When I was an undergrad, Slope Day was the last day of classes for the whole school year. Everyone would congregate at at this relatively gentle slope in front of Uris Library and sit around boozing it up. I missed out my freshman year because I was so clueless. It turned into a mud bath because of rain and on the next day...I saw a couple guys slipping and sliding around in the mud with BMX bikes. No one stopped undergrads from going and the police and ambulances generally stayed on the fringes just in case someone needed help. Oftentimes, you saw people going around with plastic containers of "OJ" or plastic bottles of "water". There was a network of volunteers going around handing out water and a whole hand-raising system to help the paramedics localize people who had blacked out. The party progressed during my years at Cornell in part because they realized that parts of the slope were not so gentle. People sometimes snowboard down this slope and make jump ramps in the wintertime. And so after enough incidents of drunk people unable to stop themselves from rolling down this slope, the administration started fencing of the steeper parts in later years. Fond memories. Alas, I hear the university banned the celebration after I graduated.

Slope Day and segregation. From my mildly blurry and drunken memories back then...I remember seeing a lot of black people hanging out in a crowd...a lot of asian people hanging out in crowds...same for the latinos as well. Sure, there was some amount of mixing as well but it made me wonder at the time why we were segregating ourselves so easily. The melting pot of culture we call America still has a whole lot of huge chunks of unassimilated cultures...which is fine. Some chunks are just sort of hard to swallow. In South Africa, I see the cultural melting pot more readily apparent in the food. The social pressures and self-imposed segregation there are still more like braai-ing several different sizzling meats together.