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Red-Skin Pemmican
3 PARTS DRIED VENISON OR BUFFALO MEAT DRIED WILD BERRIES (OPTIONAL) I PART MELTED FAT Prepare dried meat by cutting lean slices off carcass of deer or buffalo, cut in strips and dry in sun or smoke over slow campfire of sweet smelling wood. When meat has become friable (easily crumbled) pound it between stones until it's dust.
Mix this meat powder with 1/3 as much melted fat and when you've got a good smooth paste let it cool before packing it away in skins or sacks made of hides sewed up with thorn and thongs. A small amount of dried wild berries, such as choke or June berries is sometimes added after the paste has cooled.
The original meaning of the Indian word pemmican (also spelled with one "m") is "he makes grease" and that's exactly right, although pemmican has come to mean "condensed' in our language, because it really packs the most nourishment in the least space, and for this reason it is still the staff of life of explorers, airmen on exhausting flights and big game hunters who find it more practical and palatable than beef extracts and cubes.
A special fancy pemmican used by Arctic travellers is called sweet pemmican, although there isn't a speck of sugar sugar or sweetening in it.
This is a field method for preserving raw game with no measured temperature, no cure and no controlled drying environment, and it cannot be reproduced safely in or out of a modern kitchen. The notes below explain where it fails rather than how to adapt it.
- Nothing here ever reaches a lethal temperatureSlices dried in the sun or hung over a slow smoky fire sit for hours in the range where E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella and Listeria multiply rather than die. Current guidance for jerky is to heat the meat to 160F before or after drying precisely because dehydration alone concentrates surviving bacteria instead of killing them.
- No cure, no measured saltModern dried-meat recipes specify salt and, where appropriate, a nitrite cure at a stated rate. This recipe specifies neither, so there is no barrier to bacterial growth beyond water loss, which is uneven in sun-dried strips and unmeasurable without a scale or a hygrometer.
- Wild venison carries its own hazardsDeer and other cervids can carry Toxoplasma and, in much of North America, chronic wasting disease; wildlife agencies advise against consuming meat from untested animals in affected areas. Bear and wild pig add a trichinella risk that only cooking to temperature removes.
- The fat is the second problemRendered animal fat mixed into dried meat and stored warm goes rancid through oxidation, and the paste offers no acidity or refrigeration to slow it. Well-made pemmican was known to keep for long periods, but that depended on thorough drying and cool storage, not on anything in this method being reliably stable.
- Hide sacks are not food packagingSkins sewn with thorn and thong cannot be sanitised and are permeable to air, moisture and insects. Any modern equivalent of this food would be vacuum-sealed and refrigerated or frozen.
- Chokecherry pitsChokecherries and other stone fruit have cyanogenic pits. Traditional preparation crushed the whole fruit, and the practice depended on knowledge and quantity control that the instruction "a small amount of dried wild berries" does not supply.
- Terms in the text"Friable" means dry enough to crumble to powder between stones. "Juneberries" are serviceberries, Amelanchier; "choke" is chokecherry. The ratio given is three parts meat powder to one part melted fat, consistent with the text's "1/3 as much melted fat"; the recipe does not say whether by weight or volume.
- If you want the foodUse a current tested recipe for jerky or a commercial pemmican-style bar from a producer working under inspection. Do not treat this page as a procedure.