Psycho-social braaing

Dear Dreb Jr,

I would like to formally thank you for yet another fabulous BIP missive , which I unfortunately only received yesterday. I myself have been reflecting on the meaning of braais recently and have come to the conclusion that they are psycho-social cultural events. To explain how I arrived at this conclusion, I offer the following applied research case study.

During the last weekend, I spent Friday and Sunday amusing Australians. On Saturday, I spent time with my sister to take a break from amusing Australians. Part of my amusement strategy was to braai for the Australians - I did inform them about BIP, but announced that BIP membership was not open to Australians or anyone else who uses the word "barbecue" to describe braaing.

Friday's braai started well as I had some time on my own to start the weber and the braai. I had bought a very fresh snoek (R 35) and a lovingly handreared, vegan, organic but now dead Woolworths chicken (R 53) together with pork sausages and wholewheat bread for stuffing. The Australians then arrived and Buck (the son) and Caroline (the daughter) immediately started to tear Princess's room to pieces. This somewhat rattled my wife who immediately focused on child management as opposed to stuffing dead chicken. I then took over said stuffing, but had not reckoned on Australian 'barbie' fervour. Contrary to any fetish with plastic under-weight dolls, Australian 'barbie' fervour is displayed through an insistence on helping prepare food for the braai.

This somewhat flustered me and I immediately made the mistake of mixing four pork sausages with three slices of wholewheat bread and 1 egg, plus onion and herbs with the help of said Australian. The net result was that my stuffing resembled regurgitated SAA food and had to be slopped into my chicken. Said Australian then insisted on mixing the mayonnaise and apricot jam glaze for the snoek with the inevitable result that too much mayonnaise was used, leaving the snoek looking like a large uncooked baked Alaska. I then commenced to weber the chicken and braai the snoek. Said Australian insisted on lighting the braai for the snoek, which took about 60 minutes for the paraffin to burn off from the packet of firelighters used.

The chicken was smoked with rosemary a number of times in between various bottles of fermented red grapes. Said Australian, whom I shall now call Shane then took the chicken back into the house while I braaied the snoek. The fire was great and the skin was pleasantly cooked, but despite expertly turning the snoek onto the flesh side, try as I might I could not get the mayonnaise dressing to turn even one shade of brown. On realising that the fish was fully cooked despite the pallor of pure white mayonnaise everywhere I removed it and served it inside. I then realised that I could not find the chicken. Shane proudly informed me that the chicken was in the oven, which he'd turned to 180 degrees Celsius in order to keep it warm. I proceeded to serve very brown dried chicken biltong to the Australians as a counterfoil to the white mayonnaise snoek.

Sunday's braai however was an arena of struggle that I was under-prepared for. I realise in hindsight that I was perhaps a bit arrogant and over-confident in my role as BIP member. I had the foresight to prepare a waterblommetjie bredie on the stove well before the time. Despite this, Shane arrived in the morning with kids who proceeded to tear the remainder of Princess's room apart and insisted on helping cook the bredie. I hovered all over Shane to ensure that the previous Friday's mistakes were not repeated. Shane's SA friends then arrived, as well as a mutual friend Karen.

We now had seven children in the house, which rapidly detoriated into the boys beating up Princess and Karen's daughter. While this frivolity prevaled, I lit both the weber and the braai inside my garage as there was a bit of moisture in the air on Sunday if you recall. Shane had bought a chicken, and I did not make the same mistake of stuffing it this time. However, it did dry out as a result of a number of South Africans and Australians repeatedly opening the weber to check on the chicken. The boerewors was braaied by the Australian and largely rejected by all seven kids. As young family members may read this post, I am not at liberty to inform you what the boerewors looked like.

However, the term limp or flaccid have to be adjectives used in this description. I had gone to some effort to make fishcakes from the leftover mayonnaise snoek of Friday. As I was preparing to fry this, a South African friend of Shane's then insisted that the fish cakes should be braaied. This was just after I had rolled them in flour. Not wanting to offend Australians or South Africans, I agreed to this proposition. As the flour started to char, I was then forced to step into the fray and manually turn the fish cakes because the Aus/SA attepts to turn them resulted in large parts of the fishcakes breaking off and disappearing into the fire. Despite vague burns to the fingers, they were at least quasi-cooked. Unfortunately, the charred flour did leave a permanent taste in the mouth.

Now, in my reflections on the beautiful art of braaing and all that BIP stands for, I came to a startling conclusion. I hated both braais. I had demonstrated to myself just how easy it is to cook sub-standard food on a braai and I did not feel in control of my BIP process. I did feel for a moment that I should resign from all BIP activities as a result of this revelation, but stood firm and developed my psycho-social cultural theory instead.

• Simply put, never, ever braai if you are with Australians who exhibit 'barbie' fervour, which I regard as a psycho(tic) condition. 
• Secondly, never, ever braai if you are the host for Australians to invite other like-minded guests, such as South Africans based in England, who also barbecue and believe they are good at barbecuing. This is a social event where it is not worth your while to be at if you intend braaing. 
• Thirdly, never, ever braai if you are the epicentre of a cultural event where South Africans arrive to be friendly with Australians. Braaing is not part of multi-culturalism. It is uniquely South African and needs to stay that way. 

I look forward to BIP's stance on braaing as a psycho-social cultural activity, but believe that the answer is actually provided in the first line of this post from the founding BIP member: "It dawned on me the other day that i have not braaied with my friends for many a long day" .


Shayfish

Quasi-deep South region BIP