Pemmican: The Old Trail Food That Keeps for Years (How I Make It)

Dried meat, rendered fat and a little fruit. Here's the method, and why it fascinated me.

Pemmican is a food created by Indigenous peoples of North America: lean dried meat pounded fine and bound with rendered fat. Fur traders lived on it. Properly made and stored cool, it keeps a very long time.

What you need

• Very lean beef or venison, sliced thin and dried until it snaps
• Rendered beef tallow (roughly equal weight to the dried meat)
• Optional: dried berries (they shorten shelf life a little)

Method

1. Grind the brittle dried meat to a powder in a blender.
2. Gently melt the tallow; don't let it smoke.
3. Pour tallow over the meat powder until it looks like wet sand that holds together.
4. Press into a lined pan, chill, and cut into bars.

Storage

Wrap bars in parchment, then a sealed bag or jar, and keep them somewhere cool and dark. I keep a few in the freezer for camping.

This recipe is what first sent me down the rabbit hole of "forgotten" long-keeping foods. One book collects dozens of them in one place; I compare it with my other references on the review page.

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