Pemmican

(Aronia prunifolia) sometimes are added to pemmican. Pemmican has traditionally been made using whatever meat was available at the time: large game meat such as bison, deer, elk, or moose, but also fish such as salmon, and smaller game such as duck; while contemporary pemmican may also include beef. The meat is dried and chopped, before being mixed with rendered animal fat (tallow). Dried fruit may be added: cranberries, saskatoon berries (Cree ), and even blueberries, cherries, chokeberries, and currants—though in some regions these are used almost exclusively for ceremonial and wedding pemmican—and European fur traders have also noted the addition of sugar. ==Traditional preparation==

of a traditional method of drying meat for pemmican Traditionally, the meat was cut in thin slices and dried, either over a slow fire or in the hot sun until it was hard and brittle. Approximately of meat are required to make of dried meat suitable for pemmican. This thin brittle meat is known in Cree as and colloquially in North American English as dry meat. The was then spread across a tanned animal hide pinned to the ground, where it was beaten with flails or ground between two large stones until it turned into very small pieces, almost powder-like in its consistency. Typically, the melted fat would be suet that has been rendered into tallow. In some cases, dried fruits, such as blueberries, chokecherries, cranberries, or saskatoon berries, were pounded into powder and then added to the meat-fat mixture. It generally took the meat of one bison to fill a . == Serving ==

In his notes of 1874, North-West Mounted Police Sergeant Major Sam Steele recorded three ways of serving pemmican: raw, boiled in a stew called "rubaboo", or fried, known in the West as a "rechaud": ==History==

As bone grease is an essential ingredient in pemmican, archaeologists consider evidence of its manufacture a strong indicator of pemmican making. There is widespread archaeological evidence (bone fragments and boiling pits) for bone grease production on the Great Plains by AD 1, but it likely developed much earlier. However, calcified bone fragments from Paleo-Indian times do not offer clear evidence, due to lack of boiling pits and other possible usages. It has also been suggested that pemmican may have come through the Bering Strait 4–6 millennia ago. The first written account of pemmican is considered to be Francisco Vázquez de Coronado records from 1541, of the Querechos and Teyas, traversing the region later called the Texas Panhandle, who sun-dried and minced bison meat and then would make a stew of it and bison fat. The first written English usage is attributed to James Isham, who in 1743 wrote that "pimmegan" was a mixture of finely pounded dried meat, fat and cranberries. The voyageurs of the North American fur trade had no time to live off the land during the short season when the lakes and rivers were free of ice. They had to carry all of their food with them if the distance traveled was too great to be resupplied along the way. A north canoe () with six men and 25 standard packs required about four packs of food per . Montreal-based canoemen could be supplied by sea or with locally grown food. Their main food was dried peas or beans, sea biscuit, and salt pork. (Western canoemen called their Montreal-based fellows or "pork-eaters".) In the Great Lakes, some maize and wild rice could be obtained locally. By the time trade reached the Lake Winnipeg area, the pemmican trade was developed. For these people on the edge of the prairie, the pemmican trade was as important a source of trade goods as was the beaver trade for the Indigenous peoples farther north. This trade was a major factor in the emergence of the new and distinct Métis society. Packs of pemmican would be shipped north and stored at the major fur posts: Fort Alexander, Cumberland House, Île-à-la-Crosse, Fort Garry, Norway House, and Edmonton House. So important was pemmican that, in 1814, governor Miles Macdonell started the Pemmican War with the Métis when he passed the short-lived Pemmican Proclamation, which forbade the export of pemmican from the Red River Colony. Alexander Mackenzie relied on pemmican on his 1793 expedition from the Canadas to the Pacific. North Pole explorer Robert Peary used pemmican on all three of his expeditions, from 1886 to 1909, for both his men and his dogs. In his 1917 book, Secrets of Polar Travel, he devoted several pages to the food, stating, "Too much cannot be said of the importance of pemmican to a polar expedition. It is an absolute . Without it a sledge-party cannot compact its supplies within a limit of weight to make a serious polar journey successful." British polar expeditions fed a type of pemmican to their dogs as "sledging rations". Called "Bovril pemmican" or simply "dog pemmican", it was a beef product consisting, by volume, of protein and fat (i.e., a 2:1 ratio of protein to fat), without carbohydrate. It was later ascertained that although the dogs survived on it, this was not a nutritious and healthy diet for them, being too high in protein. Members of Ernest Shackleton's 1914–1916 expedition to the Antarctic resorted to eating dog pemmican when they were stranded on ice during the antarctic summer. , c. 1899, as carried by British soldiers in the Second Boer War, consisting of four ounces of pemmican and four ounces of cocoa paste During the Second Boer War (1899–1902), British troops were given an iron ration made of of pemmican and 4 ounces of chocolate and sugar. The pemmican would keep in perfect condition for decades. It was considered much superior to biltong, a form of cured game meats commonly used in Africa. This iron ration was prepared in two small tins (soldered together) that were fastened inside the belts of the soldiers. It was the last ration used and it was used only as a last resort—when ordered by the commanding officer. A man could march on this for 36 hours before he began to drop from hunger. While serving as chief of scouts for the British Army in South Africa, American adventurer Frederick Russell Burnham required pemmican to be carried by every scout. Pemmican, likely condensed meat bars, was used as a ration for French troops fighting in Morocco in the 1920s. Pemmican was also taken as an emergency ration by Amelia Earhart in her 1928 transatlantic flight. A 1945 scientific study of pemmican criticized using it exclusively as a survival food because of the low levels of certain vitamins. A study was later done by the U.S. military in January 1969, entitled Arctic Survival Rations, III. The Evaluation of Pemmican Under Winter Field Conditions. The study found that during a cycle of two starvation periods the subjects could stave off starvation for the first cycle of testing with only 1000 calories worth of pemmican. == Contemporary uses ==

Today, people in many indigenous communities across North America continue to make pemmican for personal, communal, and ceremonial consumption. Some contemporary pemmican recipes incorporate ingredients that have been introduced to the Americas in the past 500 years, including beef. There are also indigenous-owned companies that produce pemmican or foods based on traditional pemmican recipes for commercial distribution. ==See also==