Are you team pemmican or pemamicant? Well if you've ever considered setting out on a year-long journey across the Canadian wilderness then you better be the former so you can make this dried meat treat called pemmican. So thank you to Babbel for sponsoring this video as we make one of North America's oldest dishes pemmican this time on Tasting History. So this has to be one of the most requested dishes
that I've done here on the channel basically ever since I did that video on hardtack *Clack Clack* people have been asking me to make the meaty version of a survival food that has a shelf life measured
not in months but in decades just like hard tack. *Clack Clack* And just like it's cracker-like cousin, pemmican is less of an epicurean delight and more of just a means to an end. It's not something that you're
going to be serving at your next dinner party but something that you'll be really glad you
have when you are trekking through the Arctic. The word pemmican is derived from the Cree word
for processed fat. Now while it's the Cree word that is typically used today pemmican was and still is made today by Native American tribes all over North America under many different names
and with slight variations to the preparation but at its core pemmican is "meat of any kind
dried and pounded, and saturated with fat. There is as much nourishment in one pound of
pemmican as in four pounds of ordinary meat." And that meat can be pretty much anything. There
are old descriptions that talk about pemmican made of venison, beaver, elk, duck, rabbit, and even fish. Though perhaps the most common version or at least the most well-documented version was made of buffalo and that's the kind that Lewis and Clark had as they journeyed across the plains searching for a passage to the Pacific. "...Some hunters were sent out to kill buffalo in order to make pemmican to take with us..." "Pemington is buffalo meat dried or baked pounded and mixed with grease." "We eat an immensity of meat; it requires 4 deer, an elk and a deer, or one buffalo to supply us plentifully 24 hours. Meat now forms our food principally as we reserve our flour parched meal and corn as much as possible for the Rocky Mountains which we are shortly to enter and where from the Indian account game is not very abundant." So even if they couldn't agree on a spelling of the word pemmican I have decided to follow their lead, and make my pemmican out of buffalo. And let's take just a moment and talk about that word buffalo. "That is not a buffalo it is a bison." And yes that is correct, the American
buffalo is not in fact a buffalo which is an entirely different genus with the rather whimsical
name bubolina or bubalus. Oh look at these bubalus. But most people in the last 300 years have not
made that distinction and have called the bison buffalo hence the buffalo nickel, Buffalo Bill,
and many North American cities called Buffalo. So I know it is actually called a bison,
heck the scientific name is Bison bison and the plains bison has the scientific name Bison
bison bison it really really wants you to know "I am a bison" but as most writings from the period
I'm going to be discussing call it a buffalo I will be using the term interchangeably throughout this video. And if you want to blame somebody for calling it a buffalo go ahead and blame the French because it was French fur trappers in the 1600s who first called bison buffalo. The word being related to the french term for beef or 'boeuf' something that you can learn when studying
French with today's sponsor Babbel. Babbel is one of the top language learning apps in the world, and one thing that I love about them is their short 10 minute lessons. It allows me to squeeze in a lesson here and there throughout the day, and they're all taught by actual language teachers rather than
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like travel and that's why I am actually brushing up on my high school French because I'm hoping
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language you want to learn in the comments and what kind of meat you're going to use. Whether you're using bison, buffalo or some other meat you need about two pounds or one kilogram of it, and you want to make sure to trim off as much fat as possible so if you are using a fatty meat like beef get the leanest cut that you possibly can. Then slice it very thin and preferably against
the grain which will make it easier to break up later on, but if you don't do it against the grain
not a huge deal. Also to make it easier to slice very thinly if you don't have a deli slicer at home you can actually put it in the freezer for about 30 minutes. You don't want it frozen but it
will firm up and it just makes it a lot easier to slice thin. Then lay the strips out on a wire rack and put them into the oven at the lowest temperature that your oven will do. Mine was 170 degrees Fahrenheit which is about 77 degrees Celcius and that seems to be the standard. Also
make sure to put a pan in the very bottom of the oven because no matter how lean your meat is it will drip a little bit of fat and 1) it stinks if it falls onto the bottom of the
oven, and 2) it's really really hard to clean. Now of course this would not have been done in
an oven originally. 'The Curiosities of Food' from 1859 said "The North American Indians dried their
venison by exposing thin slices to the heat of the sun, on a stage, under which a small fire is kept, more for the purpose of driving away the flies than for promoting exsiccation and then they pound it between two stones on a bison hide." A more industrial method of drying it was developed in
the 19th century by Sir John Richardson, a Naval surgeon and Arctic explorer. Richardson was from
Scotland so naturally he saw a similarity between the drying of beef and the malting of barley used
in the production of whiskey. So he took steaks of beef that were "dried in a malt kiln, over an oak fire, until its moisture was entirely dissipated... It was then ground in a malt mill, when it resembled
finely grated meat." And so to be able to grind it up you're going to need to get it a lot drier than just beef jerky. You're looking to actually have it snap when you try to bend it. For me that took about 10 hours in the oven. Also if you're going to do this in a food dehydrator that's fine
but put it into the oven at 200 degrees first for about 30 minutes just to kill all of the bacteria. Now I dried all of my meat and I actually kept a bit back because I wanted to try it
here on camera just the the dried meat but I wrapped it up and today my cat took it and ate it himself this bad kitten. So you just have to trust me when I say that the texture was that of very thin balsa wood and the flavor was that of the mere memory of beef. I'm kind of certain that
any flavor was was all in my head. Anyway once it is completely dried you have to grind it up. I
started with a mortar and pestle just so I could prove to myself that it could be done by hand and once I had done so i moved on and used a blender because it is just so so much easier. Either way
you want to get it into a coarse powder. Now the only other ingredient that you absolutely need
for this is fat. "The fat which is generally the suet of the bison, is added by the traders, who purchase it separately from the natives." So like I said the meat and the fat are actually
the only two ingredients that you must have for the pemmican but according to Sir John Richardson
"To render it more agreeable to the unaccustomed palate" a proportion of the best Zante currants was added to part of it, and part of it was sweetened with sugar." So you can add in some sugar or Zante currants or really any kind of dried berry. The earliest descriptions that I could find called
for either saskatoon berries or choke berries, and even though saskatoon is much cooler sounding I couldn't find them so instead I was able to get choke berries and they look a lot like currants or
or any kind of small dried raisin but the flavor... ...is not the same. They're not that sweet they um- They're not bad. They're just kind of- They're astringent. Like I really could use some water right now. Definitely on the more sour side. It's not sour per se, but it's not sweet either.
Regardless of what berry you use, if you use any berry you'll want them chopped up very fine
or ground into as close a powder as you can. The only other ingredient that i could find in any
historical recipes was salt and that really didn't show up until like the early 20th century but I am guessing that it would help with the shelf life as well as probably the flavor. So to put everything together mix the meat with all of the other dried ingredients while you melt the fat over a low heat. Now different 19th century recipes have different amounts of fat. Sometimes it's a one to one ratio, same weight of fat to the same weight of dried meat and sometimes it's a little bit less fat so I would go ahead and have the same amount weight wise but you might not need to use it all, just use enough so that everything comes together because it can be really greasy if you use too much. Also use gloves if you're going to mix this by hand which I suggest you do because the fat on your hands takes forever to get off, use gloves. Then once everything is mixed you can "complete
the process by sewing up the pemmican in a bag of undressed hide with the hairy side outwards." You don't have a bag of undressed hide you say? Well I suppose you can use a tin can which
was often used in the 19th century and then soldered shut or for our purposes I'm just putting
it into a mold. I'm using a tiny one egg pan and a pinch bowl. You can even just form it up with your
hands just make it fairly compact whatever shape you end up making it in. And then let it cool and while it firms up make sure to check out Tasting History on Facebook and Reddit as well as Patreon because it is the support of my patrons that keeps this channel going even during the lean times just as pemmican did for travelers oh so many years ago. When and where pemmican was invented is
anyone's guess but it was definitely a long time ago because it was being made all over
North America by the time European colonists came. One of the first people to actually mention it in
his writings was the fur trader Peter Pond who was also a founder of the Northwest company in Canada. One of his partners Sir Alexander MacKenzie was a Scottish explorer who completed the first known or
rather first documented crossing of North America at least above Mexico because there are parts
of Mexico which you can walk across in a matter of days. Now pemmican was a staple of MacKenzie's
diet and he relied on it throughout the expedition but especially on his return voyage. "As I was very sensible of the difficulty of procuring provisions in this country, I thought it prudent to guard against any possibility of distress of that kind on our return; I therefore ordered ninety
pounds weight of pemmican to be buried in a hole, sufficiently deep to admit of a fire over it
without doing any injury to our hidden treasure, and which would, at the same time, secure it from
the natives of the country, or the wild animals of the woods." So 90 pound bags actually seem to
be the standard size for pemmican and it makes sense because "One bison cow in good condition
furnished dried meat and fat enough to make a bag of pemmican weighing 90 pounds." And I just imagine these 90 pound huge globs of meat dried with fat and I wish that there were
like photos looking inside of these bags because I can't really picture it. I'm guessing they
just like broke off hunks of it, I don't know, but ours is going to be a lot less. Now while MacKenzie stored his pemmican away for his return trip he had plenty of time to think of ways to kind of spruce it up and make a little bit more exciting. He did eat it plain but he also boiled it with the tops
of parsnips and "On the banks of the river there was great plenty of wild onions which when mixed up with our pemmican was a great improvement of it; though they produced a physical effect on our appetites, which was rather inconvenient to the state of our provisions." He says that because for much of the journey they were running dangerously low on food. At one point he says "I was
also compelled to confine them to two meals a day, a regulation peculiarly offensive to a Canadian voyager. One of these meals was composed of the dried rows of fish, pounded and boiled in water thickened with a small quantity of flour and fattened with a bit of grain. These articles, being
brought to the consistency of a hasty pudding, produced a substantial and not unpleasant dish." I'd probably stick to my pemmican over the fish pudding. I have had some bad luck with fish puddings in the past, and I'm a glutton for punishment because I'm making another quasi fish pudding next week. Now as I said pemmican was under many names a product of pretty much every nation native to North America or at least the northern half of North America but there was
one group that had a stronger or at least more famous connection to it. The Métis people of Canada
had a unique culture as they were the descendants of indigenous women mostly Algonquin, Ojibwe and
Cree and European men mostly French, Scottish and English fur traders. Their name Métis came from
French and referred to this mixed parentage and they were often bilingual which put them in
a good position to work with and trade with the colonists, and one of their major trade commodities was pemmican. Twice a year Métis hunting parties would go out to hunt bison. The men would hunt and the women would butcher and dry the meat. One hunting party could return with as much as
one million pounds of pemmican, and considering one bison made 90 pounds of pemmican... that's a lot of bison. They would keep a portion for themselves but then they would trade or sell off the rest. Well around the year 1800 they had two main trading partners and they were both companies. There was the Hudson's Bay Company which was the major player in the fur trade because they actually had a charter from the King and got a lot of help from England. Then there was the North West Company, a little bit more of an upstart so they relied all the more on trading with the Métis. It was around this time that back in Scotland the Highland Clearances were going on and this was a period where lords were kicking people off of their land to put sheep on because sheep grazing made a lot
more money. Even today you go to the highlands there are a lot of sheep but Thomas Douglas fifth
Earl of Selkirk was moving these highlanders to Canada where he was starting colonies and he had
started two before engaging in what essentially was a hostile takeover buying up the majority
share of the Hudson's Bay Company after which he gave himself or allowed himself to use the land
for a third colony around the Red River watershed. Now this land was used by both companies and was
the home of many Native American tribes including the Métis and as colonists and people started coming in the provisions and the amount of pemmican didn't seem quite sufficient. Well the
north west company kind of saw this happening and so they bought up a lot of extra pemmican to make sure that all of their employees would be fed as they traveled north to do fur trapping. In response this led the Governor Miles Macdonnell to issue the Pemmican Proclamation which limited the number of buffalo or bison that the Métis could hunt, and it made it so neither company's men were
allowed to take any food out of the region. Well both companies and the Métis complained but the
Hudson's Bay Company was still getting help from home in England and their majority shareholder
was kind of the owner now of the area so they were less worried than were the Métis and the
North West Company. Well the latter two groups decided to just ignore the proclamation and even plotted to attack the colony, and to paraphrase Yoda essentially it
was the northwest company and the metis against 'Begun the Pemmican War has.' Essentially it was the North West Company, and the Métis against the colonists and the Hudson's Bay Company. Tensions rise, militias were gathered, and violence broke out. At one point the Métis
and North Westerners destroyed the colony and the whole thing culminated in the Battle
of Seven Oaks in 1816. Now to realize just how insane this is it's best to put it into a modern setting. So imagine that the government decided to put a cap on the amount of caramel color that could be made and sold. We've got Coca-Cola on one side and Pepsi company on the other side vying for the remaining caramel color. So both actually raise private armies and begin skirmishing with each other, and it goes on until the city of Atlanta is destroyed and there is a pitched battle along I-85. It's madness and the only thing that ended up kind of stopping this going on, not the Coke and Pepsi one, the actual one back in the 1800s was that England stepped in. They had been
fighting the War of 1812 and Napoleon and had been you know not really paying attention what was
going on, well that was all over so finally they step in and they're like you gotta get along better and they encourage them to form one company and that's how it how it ended, but it's pretty nuts and the fact that all of that happened over pemmican makes me really curious to try this stuff. And here we are pemmican, history's Power Bar. So this is the little one, I guess I'm just
gonna break off a piece it is kind of crumbly and- if you're really, really hungry it's
fine. kind of tastes like beef jerky but the texture is very crumbly. O gotta say the berries don't do anything. I think
adding sugar would probably be a good thing, but I'm not sure that it's going to
be great either way. Part of it is the fat is just- it's kind of coating your mouth and you can really taste it. Don't use more fat than you need to get it to come
together. It's just- yeah don't use more than you need. The thing is while it was often eaten by itself it could also be cooked to make it more palatable. A journal entry from 1874 says "It was cooked in two ways in the west; one a stew of pemmican, water, flour, and if they could be
secured, wild onions or preserved potatoes. This was called 'rubaboo' the other was called
by the plain hunters a 'rechaud'. It was cooked in a frying pan with onions and potatoes or alone. Some persons ate pemmican raw, but I must say that i never had a taste for it that way." And I also didn't have a taste for it that way so I am going to do as I did with hardtack *Clack Clack* and save this for an entire year, and in a year I'm going to come back as it would have been aged you know for quite some time back in the day, and make a dish of probably rubaboo. (f i'm saying that right) I found several different spellings and I'm just assuming that's how you say it but if not please correct me. So that episode should come out in about a year. In the meantime if you haven't seen either the original hardtack video or the one where a year later I made it into what was called Civil
War hellfire stew I'm going to put that video- both of those videos down here so you can watch them and I will see you next time on Tasting History.
What a great episode! Not only a dish that many people requested, but also so many great reactions/possible memes:
Pemmican/Pemmicant (very start, feels like a drake meme)
Angry Max typing (“thats a bison not a buffalo”)
“Ayyy look at these bubalus!”
The Pelipper in the back.... Pelican... Pemmican... Max's mind
Been waiting on this episode! Whenever I hear something about pemmican I am reminded of the pilot episode for Due South, great series. The main character, Benton Fraser, who embodies every Canadian stereotype imaginable, comes across a couple nurses in Chicago asking for donations to feed the hungry. He pulls out his wallet, which makes the nurses very happy, only to drop a couple pieces of pemmican into their collection jar. One nurse pulls up a piece with a 'wtf' look on her face and asks 'what is this?', to which Benton replies: 'Pemmican. If you're still hungry after you finish it, drink water; it expands in your stomach.'
There's a reason we call 'em choke cherries, eh! :D
The only enjoyment I've ever had involving choke cherries is watching people taste them for the first time; I couldn't tell you how many pounds of saskatoons I've picked while camping as a kid but at no point did the parents ever send us out for an ice cream pail of choke cherries!
Great episode! Pemmican was one of the foods taken by the ill-fated Terra Nova expedition (Scott and Oates). The diet seems to be one of the main reasons things went so tragically wrong for the Scott team.
Good BBC documentary "Blizzard: Race to the Pole" if anyone wants to see a good comparison of Amundsen vs Scott in terms of strategy and science.
You might try using pemmican for the fat in a hell fired stew
Today’s episode was most excellent!
And I was pleased to see my minor cameo :)
Small correction: the word métis is pronounced /met(s)is/ not /me.ti/ (it's one of those rare words in french where we pronounce the final s).
Also, it's the french equivalent to the spanish word "mestizo".
Was that a sneaky bit of /r/ShermanPosting I saw there?