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| "Buffalo Hunt" - George Catlin |
In it’s simplest form, pemmican is made from dried meat and tallow. Tallow is rendered fat that many times comes from the fat around the internal organs of the animal. Usually the meat is lean with as little fat content as possible. Sliced thinly it’s allowed to dry. Historically speaking, with buffalo, this was done by draping the long strips of meat on a lashed together rack. Think of a tripod with horizontal poles lashed on in a somewhat ladder like configuration. Once with meat was dried it was usually cut and pounded into a powdery consistency. Tallow was then heated into a liquid state and mixed with the now powdery dried meat until it stuck together. It was often times placed in some type of parfleche, a rawhide container. In our example of buffalo, the animal would provide for all things necessary for both the pemmican and the parfleche. While there definitely were variations, for example, bone marrow could be used for the tallow, meat could be dried over a low fire where it was essentially “jerked” or berries/chokecherries could also be added to the mix, what has just been described would likely be your most common type of “long term use” pemmican.
The Parfleche Meat Holder
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| Soaking The Rawhide |
About a month ago I started working on a project that I just finished up. I decided in preparation for an upcoming winter camp I was going to make pemmican and a parfleche meat folder to keep it in.
Going back to our example of buffalo, the hide of it was used to make different rawhide containers called “perleche.” The flesh side would have been scraped clean of meat and fat and the hair would oftentimes be removed by being pounded with a stone. The rawhide would then be shaped and made into different “folders” and containers. Understandably, our minds many times will go to these images of pigment decorated rawhide of different American tribal design. A number, however, were decorated by only incised designs and many were undecorated all together. As this particular “folder” style parfleche was going to be holding pemmican, of which the tallow would inevitably seep into the rawhide, helping to seal it all around, not to mention eventually become a bit of a greasy mess, it made the most logical sense to me to not decorate this one.
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| Rawhide Shaped and Holes Drilled |
Again, as I did not have ready access to buffalo, I used the rawhide of a deer I had shot several years back to make my meat folder parfleche. The starting size was a rectangle, roughly that of a sheet of copy paper. I cut some thin strips as well to use for the lacing on the sides and set these to soaking. I soaked the rectangle in water a bit so that I could shape it into an envelope with a flap that was roughly 5” x 9”. As I was trying to complete this folder at school on a Friday afternoon during a prep period I marked out where I wanted my edge holes for lacing as wells as the holes for tying the flap shut
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| Folder Laced and Drying |
and then drilled them out. (A historic method would be to burn the holes out with a burning stick. You could also heat a piece of round metal stock of the diameter you wish to have to burn your holes that way.) I then tied a couple knots at the bottom of my rawhide laces and then laced them through the side holes to close the sides of the folder. The extra lacing I tied off at the top of the folder and then tied to each other so that there was a strap to hang the folder with. I then slightly stuffed the inside of the folder to give it some shape and used binder clips to hold the flap down while it dried. I let it hang from the strap I made. I made ties for the flap from strips of brain tan deer hide that I had.
As I didn’t have ready access to buffalo meat, I wanted to get a good sized piece of beef with as little fat content as possible. I selected a 5-6 pound piece of “eye of round.” While I wanted to build a rack
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| Mixing the Tallow and Dried Meat |
for in my house (or even daringly my classroom) it was determined that “jerking” the meat at a low temperature in my smoker would probably be the best way to go in December in Montana. I thinly sliced the meat, sprinkled some salt and pepper on it for some slight flavor and into the smoker it went until it was mostly dry. I then removed the meat onto cookie cooling racks in our kitchen until the meat was completely dry. I then broke the meat down into small pieces until I was ready to continuing processing it. It being winter, and as I don’t currently have a mortar and pestle, I used a food processor to continue breaking down the meat. I was able to get what appeared “mostly” powdered down. I now had roughly 4 ½ cups of dried powdered beef.
While I look forward to doing the whole process from scratch at some point, for the sake of time, as
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| Putting the Pemmican in the Folder |
well as this being my first time making pemmican, I purchased beef tallow on Amazon.com. I figured as I had 4 ½ cups of powdered meat I’d likely need roughly the same amount of melted tallow. Boy was I wrong! Shortly into the pour from the saucepan on the stove into the large glass bowl I had the powdered meat in I realized I wasn’t going to need nearly as much tallow. I quickly poured from the bowl into the saucepan what I figured was the excess tallow before it was all absorbed into the meat. I then thoroughly mixed things until it was sticky enough to hold its form. The excess tallow I allowed to cool down some and then back into it container it went. The pemmican was now done. I put it into the folder. It was still warm. A while later you could see where the tallow was working its way into the rawhide.
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| Pemmican for Soup |
Finishing Up
I kept set some pemmican aside that was roughly the size of a golf ball that wasn’t put into the folder. In a similar fashion to what Rodney Douglas and Sean McQueen had done on their 2017 Fall Hunt, I took that ball of pemmican and water and made it into a soup in my tin cup for part of my dinner. I added a little salt to the pemmican soup. The flavor, to me at least, wasn’t off putting. It was slightly reminiscent of watery juices from a steak. Not terrible at all really. It’s not my favorite, however, I think on a cold night night in the snow in the winter if I was not able to make meat, I’d be glad to have this. In fact, I look forward to using this pemmican during our upcoming winter camp.
Final Thoughts
I still need to “seal” the side seams of the folder with tallow.
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| Pemmican Soup for Dinner |
I think pounding the meat with a stone or using a mortal and pestel would give you better results in as far as processing the meat. The food processor appeared to do a good job, however, there was a decent amount, I’d say between ¼ and ⅓ of the meat, that was still like little pieces of twig.
I want to do this again where I dry the meat on a rack outside. It would be interesting to see the difference in how the tallow absorbs into the powdered meat and how this affects the meat.
I’d like to do this with venison as well as buffalo and use some bone marrow too.
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| Meat Folder full of Pemmican |
If you haven’t tried pemmican yet, I’d encourage you to take on this project. You get to combine some historic food making along with getting to work with parfleche. It’s just another way that we get to learn about and experience what life was like for the people we portray. I would offer a word of caution in regards to the pemmican though. As I understand there are basically two different kinds of pemmican. The first is as we’ve described so far: meat and tallow. This combination will last a LONG time. The second kind is meat, tallow and the berries/chokecherries. This was seen more as a short term pemmican as the addition of the fruit would eventually cause it to spoil. If you make this second type, be sure you get it all used up and not forget about it buried in your gear for a couple years...you might end up with some smelly gear and needing to make a new meat folder!
-- Leifer
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| Incised Decorated Parfleche Folder |
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| Native Woman Pounding Meat for Pemmican |
