Wooly Bully Fried Slice

or Sunny Side Egg & Cheese Fried Slice

Egg & Cheese Fried Bread Slice, Overhead

Immutable pillars. We all know someone like that: utterly dependable, reliable and steadfast. Nearly always readily approachable and quite often solitary souls. Ever wondered where they turn to on those days when their metaphorical sky overhead is the color of a television tuned to a dead channel? For those steeped in the by now effortless comforts of well worn solitude; the choices are limited.

The remedial solace of favorite dishes for those days when the world revolts against us in a thousand little ways were discussed in previous posts. Examples are 2 Cheese Curried Omelette, The Belfried Pig and Orange Syrup & Coconut Tart. Wooly Bully – or Soft Egg & Cheese – Fried Slice is a palliative that also falls in this category, but on the far, acute end. To be called for on those shambling days numb in the shadow of a darkened moon when ladders are few and steep.

The dish is fast and easy to prepare with basic ingredients almost always at hand. Also, a significant benefit is the minimum of dirty dishes generated during the preparation and eventual tucking in into the sublimity of liquid sunshine, sultry molten cheese and the buttery comfort of fried bread. Powdered biltong adds a swanky, wholesome undertone that imperceptibly elevates the spirit and hastens the transit of any penumbra.

Conveniently, when prepared with fried eggs of a firmer consistency, poached eggs, mushy scrambled eggs or even a folded omelette, the dish still inspires and gladdens the anima.

Egg & Cheese Fried Bread Slice, Close Up

Uno dos

One two tres quatro

Ay, wooly bully

Watch it now, watch it

Here he comes, here he comes

Watch it now, he get ‘cha

Matty told Hatty

About a thing she saw

Had two big horns

And a wooly jaw

Wooly bully,

Wooly bully ...

Sam The Sham & The Pharaohs, 1965

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SUNNY SIDE UP EGG & CHEESE FRIED SLICE

– PRINT RECIPE –

Recipe yields:

1 Portion

Preparation time:

± 5 Minutes

Cooking time:

7 – 10 Minutes

Special Equipment Required:

1 x 25cm Heavy skillet with a fitting lid.

Ingredients:

White bread, thick sliced, well buttered on each side	2
X/L Eggs, fried sunny side up	2
Processed cheese slices	6
Biltong powder / Powdered beef jerky	2 x 15ml
Fine cayenne pepper	± 1 ml
Black pepper, freshly ground	To taste
Salt	To taste

Method:

Fry the buttered bread slices on one side in the covered skillet over medium high heat until the slices are browned to your degree of choice.
Turn the bread and immediately add the cheese slices to the very hot, just turned sides of the bread slices. Cover and turn the heat down to medium. Fry until the cheese on top is molten and gooey.
Simultaneously, in a separate pan-fry your eggs sunny side up (or in any other favourite form) to your preferred degree of doneness. Attempt to have the molten cheese on the fried bread and the eggs ready simultaneously.
Remove the fried bread slices to a pre-warmed plate and immediately sprinkle the cayenne pepper and powdered biltong (or beef jerky) over. Quickly add the eggs on top of each slice.
Season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper.
Serve immediately with a mug of your favorite Ceylon tea – hot, milky and sweet.

Comments:

Try to use the most expensive processed cheese you can find? Generally, I don’t favour processed cheese, but for the state of mind this recipe is intended for, good processed cheese is acceptable and we’ll let the temporary lapse in culinary standards slide.
Having your molten cheese topped bread slices and fried eggs ready simultaneously requires a modicum of hand & eye coordination. Fortunately practice makes perfect and even the ‘failures’ go down with gusto and alacrity.
For a more substantial meal, add hefty scoops of best quality tinned baked beans as a side dish. Mix a dollop of good quality balsamic vinegar into the baked beans for a spirit lifting adventure.

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BILTONG

Biltong – a type of cured, air dried meat – is a uniquely quaint South African delicacy that started out long ago as a very important and common meat preservation technique to conserve excess quantities of beef and game in a durable, readily consumable format. During our South African frontier days the ability to make biltong was an essential and life preserving skill. Each family had their own recipe, favoured meat cuts and techniques, and not being able to make biltong seriously dented any prospective bride’s eligibility for marriage.

Somewhat later on, during the ‘taming’ of the vast Southern African wilderness, producing biltong in bulk from game became an essential process, and often lucrative career, to supply animal protein as a durable, readily produced and easy to transport commodity to many labour intensive industries. Commercial activities that included mines and railroad construction companies as well as large scale agricultural endeavours such as sugar cane, coffee and tea plantations as well as commercial cattle ranches. Thousands of labourers had to be fed daily (and cost effectively) to achieve maximum productivity for their capitalist overlords. Biltong was a cheap and readily derived from the vast herds of African plains game. The hunting journals of many famous big game hunters from that era abound with stories of narrow scrapes with African buffalo (and often elephant and hippo as well) shot for their meat, hides and ivory as an extra income when no rich European aristocrats or foreign Industrialists were around as guided, paying clients for safaris often lasting several months.

The arrival of effective and cheap electrical refrigeration liberated the average housewife and household supervisor from the cumbersome chore of frequently preparing biltong. Today, it is almost exclusively a male prerogative with many non-commercial hunters preparing biltong as a hobby from sport hunted venison (less frequently farm raised beef). Invariably this biltong is a delicacy produced for personal consumption according to each Nimrod’s often closely guarded recipe and technique. And infallibly, where two or more of these weekend Nimrods would gather in their man caves, at least one would own – and have present – a custom made pocket knife with a sheep’s foot blade profile dedicated to only, and only, cut its proud owner’s biltong.

Beef biltong, however, is a huge commercial activity in South Africa today. It is exceedingly rare to find any butchery not making their own to varying degrees of success and popularity, from sole proprietorships right up to the in-house butchery sections of the big chain grocers.

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Traditionally, the main ingredients of biltong are meat, ground black pepper, lightly roasted & crushed coriander seed, salt, spirit vinegar and Worcestershire sauce, often with varying quantities of brown sugar. Additional, modern flavourings and seasonings include – amongst others – balsamic vinegar (sometimes with malt or cider vinegars also), ground allspice, dried & ground chillies, nutmeg and less frequently saltpeter or sodium nitrite. The preparation methods vary wildly, but generally include as standard steps marinating in vinegar solution wide strips of meat cut from several standard carcass sections, followed by flavouring and curing the drained stris and finally drying the cured, flavoured meat by means of various methods from plain old air drying through assorted home built contraptions up to sophisticated, commercially produced mechanical dryers with impressive temperature, humidity and air flow controls.

Being unfamiliar with American jerky (or Mexican carne seca for that matter), I have to rely on external sources describing the differences between biltong and jerky. Wikipedia says:

“Biltong differs from jerky in three distinct ways:

The meat used in biltong can be much thicker due to the slower drying time in dry air conditions; typically biltong meat is cut in strips approximately 1"(25 mm) wide – but can be thicker. Jerky is normally very thin meat.
The vinegar, salt and spices in biltong, together with the drying process cure the meat as well as adding texture and flavour. Jerky is traditionally dried with salt but without vinegar.
Jerky is often smoked; biltong is rarely smoked.”

Sliced biltong (and its usually associated droë wors – sections of thin, air dried beef sausage) is a popular snack at informal South African braais (back yard barbeques), is frequently found as a light appetizer in many of our higher end restaurants and quite often encountered at fancy event functions as a light amuse bouché. It is absolutely mandatory as a savoury snack on long road trips irrespective whether said trips be for leisure, sport or business. And off course, no televised South African rugby match is a real match without biltong or droë wors present, irrespective wheter you are by yourself or in the raucous company of soon to be inebriated friends.

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Sliced – and sometimes diced up – biltong are also popular additions to stews, soups, muffins or an assortment of quick risen savoury breads such as cheese & herb. Some enterprising home bakers like to add it to pot bread – butter enriched, yeast risen white bread prepared in a round, flat bottomed cast iron pot and baked in embers and coals on the side of an open barbeque fire. Commercially, we have a quite a range of biltong flavoured or enriched foodstuffs available varying from biltong flavoured chips (crisps for you linguistically heathen Americans) through various baked goods up to and including cheese spreads of varying shades of dreadfulness.

Fairly recently, biltong and blue cheese soup was a popular culinary Cinderella trying to find her hare-brained, not so royal prince. Depending on the cook or chef involved, the soup could vary from truly sublime right down to the abominable. Thankfully its popularity waned at last. Sadly still popular are an assortment of biltong and [… insert your animal of choice here …] potjies. Now a potjie as a cooking utensil is a very popular, three legged cast iron pot of standard sizes and is used to cook an assortment of dishes over an open fire. Favoured dishes are a variety of stews, mielie pap (maize porridge) and steamed breads. Potjie or potjie kos invariably refers to a hodge-podge stew of some sort of meat, a motley collection of vegetables, a starch of some sort, a gravy of widely varying consistency and sometimes savoury dumplings steamed on top of the stew as it cooks. As with biltong and blue cheese soup, the quality of the final potjie can vary from rather good to almost inedible depending on the experience, ability and levels of intoxication of the almost universally male cooks. In my opinion, biltong is a wasted and misused addition to any potjie.

And finally but not least: small biltong strips are often used as a teething aid for babies. The drier the biltong is, the better it becomes for itchy gums. I must make a mental note of this as my return to toothlessness started recently too.

Sources:

1. BILTONG; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biltong; Retrieved on 24/01/2021.

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