Subject: Jerky vs Pemmican 3

From: [email-masked] (Jim Weller)
Date: 25 Feb 2000 15:23:53 EST

MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05
 
      Title: Pemmican and How To Make It Part 1
 Categories: Native, Info, Preserving, Meats, Venison
      Yield: 4 Servings
 
      1    Info file
 
  When the white men set out across North America, a reliable supply of
  portable provisions was one of the major problems. Lacking the skills
  of the native hunters, it was doubtful that they could live off the
  country. They knew something about preserving food, a necessity for
  sailing ships, but it was limited to salting and pickling. The
  resultant salt pork and hardtack were unappetizing fare but they kept
  life in a man.
  
  The Plains Indians had a better solution to the problem, and one on
  which the fur traders and explorers came to depend. The answer was
  pemmican. The Cree word Pimikan meant, roughly, manufactured grease,
  but there was a lot more than that to it.
  
  Basically it was buffalo meat, cut with the grain in thin slices or
  strips and dried in the sun or over a slow fire. A smoking fire added
  flavor and was useful for keeping the flies off though if meat racks
  were high they tended to be clear of flies. The dry-meat was then
  spread on a hide and pounded by stones or mallets to become "beat
  meat" which was tossed into a rectangular rawhide container (hair on
  the outside) about the size of a flour sack. To the dehydrated,
  crumbled meat was added one-third or more of melted fat and the bag
  was sewn up. The fat might be mixed with the meat before or after it
  was bagged. While the pemmican was cooling the bag was turned from
  time to time to prevent the fat all settling on one side. Compressed
  in a skin bag that was greased along the seams to eliminate air and
  moisture, it would keep for years.
  
  In the best pemmican, which was limited in quantity, the meat was very
  finely pulverized and only marrowfat, from boiled broken bones, was
  used. For variety and flavour dried fruits such as chokecherries,
  Saskatoon or Service berries might be added. The pemmican bags were
  flattened for easier handling. At times, rendered fat was stored in
  rawhide bags, left in a round shape to distinguish them from the
  pemmican bags. Marrow, while better tasting, was comparatively scarce
  and did not keep as well as ordinary tallow and would be preserved in
  bladders. The bags of pemmican weighed 80 to 90 pounds and it was
  estimated that each bag accounted for two buffalo (bison). So high
  was the food value that three-quarters of a pound was a reasonable
  day's ration but hard working voyageurs were more likely to consume
  between one and two pounds each in a day.
  
  Moose and elk meat was sometimes treated similarly but the results
  were not so satisfactory. In some regions fish pemmican was made by
  pounding dried fish, mixed often with sturgeon oil, but it was more
  usual, as it is now among the Crees, for the pounded fish and the
  fish oil to be kept separately, the oil in animal bladders.
  
  David Thompson in 1810, described pemmican in detail: "...dried
  provisions made of the meat and fat of the bison under the name of
  pemmican, a wholesome, well tasted nutritious food, upon which all
  persons engaged in the fur trade mostly depend for their subsistence
  during the open season; it is made of the lean and fleshy parts of
  the bison dried, smoked and pounded fine: in this state it is called
  beat meat: the fat of the bison is of two qualities, called hard and
  soft;...the latter...when carefully melted resembles butter in
  softness and sweetness. Pemmican is made up in bags of ninety pounds
  weight, made of the parchment hide of the bison with the hair on; the
  proportion of the Pemmican when best made for keeping is twenty
  pounds of soft and the same of hard fat, slowly melted together, and
  at a low warmth poured on fifty pounds of beat meat, well mixed
  together, and closely packed in a bag of about thirty inches in
  length, by near twenty inches in breadth, and about four in thickness
  which makes them flat, the best shape for stowage and carriage...I
  have dwelt on the above, as it (is) the staple food of all persons,
  and affords the most nourishment in the least space and weight, even
  the gluttonous French Canadian (the voyageurs) that devours eight
  pounds of fresh meat every day is contented with one and a half
  pounds per day: it would be admirable provision for the Army and
  Navy."
  
  By Dorthea Calverley
  http://www.calverley.dawson-creek.bc.ca/Part01-FirstNations/
 
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