The Native American Energy Bar - Pemmican
Portable and tasty, this Native American energy bar provided sustenance for travelers. The primary meat was American bison (buffalo). "Most land travelers, except in the great deserts or the frozen north, expected to live off the terrain, but took a store of provisions with they by way of insurance. Such provisions had to be light and compact when the traveler moved on his own feet and was his own beast of burden, and from native Americans, north and south, the European explorer learned the virtues of two sustaining and lightweight meat products, pemmican and charqui [jerky]. Pemmican was ideally suited to the chilly north. It was made by drying thinly sliced lean meat, usually for one of the larger game animals, over a fire or in the sun and wind. The dried meat was pounded to shreds and mixed thoroughly with an almost equal quantity of melted fat, some marrow from the bones and a few handfuls of wild cherries, and then packed in rawhide sacks that were tightly sewn up and sealed with tallow. Pemmican's name came from a Cree Indian word for fat, and its high fat content made it a valuable source of warmth and energy. It was pemmican that sustained the fur trader Alexander Mackenzie during his pioneering journey of 1793, when he became the first European to cross North America from coast to coast. Half a century later Arctic explorers were to be furnished with a refined version in cans, scientifically prepared by Mackenzie's fellow Scot and successor in Canadian exploration, Sir John Richardson. Richardson found that if the neat were slowly dried over an oak fire it improved pemmican's keeping qualities, and that first-grade currants or sugar made an acceptable substitute for wild cherries."
Food in History, Reay Tannahill [Three Rivers Press:New York] 1973, 1988
"Pemmican is the traditional iron rations of the North American Indians, made of dried buffalo or other meat pounded to a paste, mixed with rat and often fruit, especially cranberries, and shaped into small cakes. Carried on hunting trips, it could last almost indefinitely. The term has been take over for a small but rather less ethnic mixture of beef and dried fruit, used as emergency rations by explorers, soldiers, etc., in the Arctic. In origin it is a Cree word, pimikan, based on pimii, 'grease,fat.'"---An A-Z of Food & Drink, John Ayto [Oxford University Press: Oxford] 2002
"Pemmican. A form of hard, preserved meat, used by the N. American Indians...The meat, from buffalo, deer, or other animals, was air dried in strips until quite hard, then pounded to a powder and mixed with melted fat. It was usual to mix berries, especially cranberries, but also chokeberries. The resulting stiff paste was packed in skins, inside which it dried to a hard, chewy consistency. Pemmican made in this way keeps mainly because it is dry...Salt played no part in the original drying process, though it might be added later for flavour. The berries were probably also added for flavour, but had a useful effect because of their content of benzoic acid, a natural preservative, which represses the growth of micro-organisms. The fat also helps preservation by sealing the meat from the air. The skin wrapping is not a sterile container because the food is not cooked in it--in fact, the only heating is the melting of the fat--but at least keeps the contents clean. Pemmican was adapted by white explorers to suit their own needs and tastes. In the 1820s the Arctic explorer Sir John Richardson used the malting equipment of a brewery to make pemmican. The meat was dried in the malting kiln and ground in the malt mill. It was mixed with rendered suet, currants, and sugar, and packed in tin canisters. Soon pemmican was being canned in a conventional manner, which safeguarded its preservation and allowed it to be made in a slightly less dry and tough form. It could be chewed as it came, from the can, or made into a primitive stew. Canned pemmican remained a staple food of explorers and mountaineers."
Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson, 2nd edition edited by Tom Jaine [Oxford University Press: Oxford] 2007
"It seems strange that the original Native American pemmican is almost never mentioned in the diaries and records of migrants on the western wagon trails...Despite the fact that they often took mountain men as guides during the summer months, the godly and respectable migrant seemed reluctant to eat Indian and wild men's food, sometimes with disastrous consequences. The value of the meat in pemmican was in its drying, which concentrated and preserved it, making it portable and lasting. Drying is probably the earliest and simplest way to preserve food, and it is possible that man was drying food even before he cooked it."
Pickled, Potted & Canned: How the Art and Science of Food Processing Changed the World, Sue Shepard [Simon & Schuster:New York] 2000
