jet comments on Pemmican: History's Power Bar

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Are you pemmiCAN or pemmican't? Pemmican is from the cree word for processed fat.

Max Miller covers pemmican.

summerizer

Pemmican: dried meat, fat, and survival

Pemmican is a North American survival food: dried meat pounded and saturated with fat, with shelf life measured in decades.
The name comes from Cree, and many Native nations made related foods under different names and local methods.
One 1859 source defines it as dried, pounded meat saturated with fat and gives one pound as equal to four pounds of ordinary meat.
Older food records include venison, beaver, elk, duck, rabbit, fish, and the buffalo version used by Lewis and Clark.
"Buffalo" and "bison" are used interchangeably because period sources do, even though the animal is scientifically bison.

Making the pemmican

Start with about two pounds, or one kilogram, of very lean bison or other meat, trimmed of visible fat.
Slice the meat very thin, preferably across the grain, and firm it briefly in the freezer when thin slicing is difficult.
Dry the strips at the lowest oven setting, with a catch pan below, until they are brittle enough to snap.
Historical drying used sun, racks, a small fly-chasing fire, stone pounding, and later Richardson's malt-kiln and malt-mill method.
Grind the dried meat into a coarse powder; a mortar and pestle works, but a blender does it faster.
Melt suet or other fat over low heat, then mix it into the powdered meat and optional dry ingredients.
Optional additions include Zante currants, sugar, saskatoon berries, chokeberries, and later salt.
Use roughly equal weights of fat and dried meat only as a starting point, because excess fat makes the finished food greasy.
Pack the mixture tightly into hide, tins, molds, or small pans, then cool it until firm.

How it tasted

Raw pemmican breaks crumbly and tastes like beef jerky wrapped in a heavy mouth-coating layer of fat.
Chokeberries do little for the flavor; sugar might help, but the main rule is not using more fat than needed.
It is tolerable when hunger matters more than pleasure, and cooking it is the better path.

Explorers and stored food

Lewis and Clark made buffalo pemmican for the plains journey and reserved flour, parched meal, and corn for the Rockies.
Their journals tie pemmican to huge meat needs, with one buffalo feeding the party for about twenty-four hours.
Alexander Mackenzie relied on pemmican, buried ninety pounds for his return, and cooked it with parsnip tops or wild onions.
Mackenzie's low-provision meals also included a fish-roe pudding thickened with flour and fat.

Métis trade and the Pemmican War

The Métis made pemmican a major trade commodity through large seasonal bison hunts.
Hunting parties could return with enormous supplies, and one bison cow could make a ninety-pound bag.
The Hudson's Bay Company and North West Company both depended on this food for fur-trade travel and northern work.
Selkirk's Red River colony intensified food pressure after Highland Clearances settlers arrived under Hudson's Bay Company control.
Governor Miles Macdonell's Pemmican Proclamation restricted hunting and export of food from the region.
The Métis and North West Company ignored the order, violence followed, and the Battle of Seven Oaks came in 1816.
The conflict ended when Britain pushed the rival companies toward the 1821 merger.

Cooking pemmican

A later western method boiled pemmican with water, flour, wild onions, or potatoes into rubaboo.
Another method fried it with onions and potatoes, or alone, as rechaud.

References