Pemmican Diaries
A long, free one — about pemmican, but also, like, what the pemmican represents.
Some housekeeping — at least one person has said they’re struggling to become a paid subscriber! Is this happening to you? If so, let me know! Comments are open.
If I have it my way, I won’t be travelling any more this summer — I had to, for a few things, this spring — work, a wedding, family obligations. I did not have to, but wanted to, for at least one of my excursions. Traveling is expensive, even if you’re staying with friends or family. It’s exhausting. It’s hard for me to be consistent about what I eat — in the two months that I’ve had to leave my city semi-frequently, my weight loss has slowed considerably. I’ve had to face the reality of my size fluctuating the way it tends to when my sleep, routine, and environment are all disrupted.
Part of what makes this difficult is that food is one of my primary coping strategies, and is often my stand-in for actual comfort or relief when I’m in a situation that’s not what I’d love it to be. Food is a really effective way for me to control the way I feel. When I don’t control the way I feel, there are very real social and psychological consequences I must accept and live through. These are heightened when I travel, and I’m often tired and uncomfortable and overstimulated. It’s easy to lose touch with my long-term goals when I’d rather just fall back on my established habits.
I also definitely see myself in the concept of decision fatigue. Having to make choices is exhausting — specifically, having to do the right, but boring and corny and played-out thing when I would much rather make poor but much more life-affirming choices, and over and over and over again. This makes me want to scream. Part of the work of this project is really identifying what’s stuck, habitually or psychologically, for me — and either change (which takes time) or work around myself, as I am, to meet my goals anyway.
So, when faced with another trip — Montreal to Vancouver, a five-and-a-half-hour plane ride and a three-hour time difference, for demanding and difficult intellectual labour, when I was already feeling kind of socially tapped out, and really starting to feel the dirge of my caloric deficit after losing weight consistently but not nearly as quickly as I would like, for four months — I realized I was developing naughty travel habits. So, what was my solution, you may ask? Was it one of the normal things? Was it to come up with some kind of plan of eating? Become a different person overnight? Decide to choose to do some of the right things, but not all of them? Surrender to the slow grind of change?
No, of course not. I made pemmican.
Pemmican has been called the bread of the wilderness, the ultimate survival food, and other things. It is roughly 1 pound of dried meat powder and 1 pound of tallow or equivalent shelf-stable fat, and a tablespoon of salt — tallow is shelf-stable for at least a bit at room temperature. Dried meat, same (it’s basically beef jerky). The salt is a preservative, and also prevents the whole thing from tasting like ass. And I was going to make it — so I didn’t have to spend money, and precious emotional energy, on at least as many food decisions while travelling for work.
People add all kinds of bells and whistles to pemmican. The most common of these bells or whistles is dried fruit — specifically, dried preserves of the small fruits that tend to be common in Canada. There are over 200 species of small, fleshy fruits here. It doesn’t matter much which ones you use.
I come by my impulse towards pemmican construction honestly — I’m a native lady, but we don’t need to be weird about it. Also, like, I think pemmican has been absorbed into the larger cultural fabric at this point — white people had whole wars about it, and shit. I’m not here to gatekeep pemmican, non-native people can obviously make it. I’m not really sure why you would, because it doesn’t taste, like, awesome — will I get NDN cancelled for saying that? It’s true. It’s objectively sick hiking food, though. It takes up almost no space, and just bodyslams your hunger with a combination of super-long-burning energy and being the kind of intense-tasting food you won’t like, care about food that much anymore. This is an aside, but I tend to eat when I’m bored, and I know that, so when I had an external writing studio I used to only keep sardines, rice cakes, and bottles of water there — because when I knew I was hungry for canned sardines and rice cakes, I was hungry enough to stop writing.
The benefit of adding berries to pemmican are twofold: there’s the inclusion of dietary fibre and a more complete vitamin profile, first of all — berries are some of the most unambiguously good-for-you foods that exist. From a culinary perspective, berries also add the high notes of tart and sweet which cut through the heaviness of meat and fat, significantly. I don’t have an enormously powerful sweet tooth — if I crave carbohydrates, it tends to be the savoury kind (I have never met a pasta recipe I could not rationalize as single-serving). I love a powerfully sour berry. There’s a brightness offered, especially by tarter berries, which counter-balances the heavy dynamics of especially the fat.
Despite this, I wasn’t actually planning on adding any berries to my pemmican, for two reasons. Well, maybe three: what if it was super delicious, and then I just sat down and ate like two thousand calories of pemmican in one sitting? That wasn’t not on my mind. But also, I was busy, and drying berries takes more time. I’d never made pemmican before, and I wanted to start out making the most basic recipe I could — it doesn’t get more basic than meat and fat.
I also thought, erroneously, that adding berries would make the pemmican less caloric, and I wanted maximum calories for smallest amount of space. Turns out that’s not the case, having googled it just now — a pound of dehydrated berries is actually more caloric than a pound of dehydrated beef. You live and you learn.
I don’t, however, own a dehydrator, which means that the process of dehydrating anything in my house is fiddly — I have a busted old second-hand oven which I bought cheap, to replace my other busted old second-hand oven, and the thing won’t even turn on unless I set it to cook at at least 275F — which is about a hundred degrees higher than ideal for dehydrating. This means that any dehydrating process can’t really be a set-it-and-forget-it situation. One needs to baby the shit out of it.
I was already facing the possibility of not dehydrating the meat properly — risking botulism, other bacterial overgrowths, and so on. The more complex a recipe, especially one that’s supposed to be shelf-stable without refrigeration, the more opportunities to make a mistake that could make me sick. As I’m inexperienced drying meat, I wanted to control for other variables. So, no berries for me. Next time.
I’d made a failed attempt to make pemmican a few weeks ago — I’d dried ground beef and blended it with pre-dried berries purchased from my usual CSA basket. I had been halted, in my process, by my inability to locate the correct kind of fat for the recipe at my usual meat-procuring establishments. My personal ethics include the consumption of the bodies of animals. An essential part of this exchange is paying more money to make sure I’m at least not knowingly participating in abusive animal agriculture — I’ve been doing this for years, and it was part of how we ate meat at home when I was a kid. I don’t say this to be judgy or preachy, but it’s true that I think of that relationship in very uncool, very serious, very woo-woo terms. This can make finding meat I want inconvenient. So, with renewed research vigour, I found a farm which is local to me, and raises grass-fed Angus beef among other high-welfare animals. Their website boasts a holistic approach to sustainability which is based on animal welfare, labour rights, and environmentalism. They had a good reputation. I made an order.
I had never rendered tallow from beef before. I hadn’t googled it, and I didn’t know exactly what the equivalency would be between raw fat purchased and tallow rendered. So, I bought a selection of items — a five-pound bag of beef suet, a five-pound bag of beef back fat, and two packages of pre-rendered tallow. I would be methodical, I reasoned. Scientific-like.
Suet is biologically different than the other fat in a cow. There are straps of subcutaneous fat under the animal’s skin, and throughout its muscles. Suet, on the other hand, is the visceral fat that surrounds the kidneys and heart. It plays, like organs tend to, a multiplicity of complex roles in the interdependent universe of a living body. Suet has a higher percentage of a triglyceride called glyceryl tristearate, or stearin — this makes suet melt at a higher temperature than other fats. “Tallow” is the rendered form of either suet or muscle fat.
I picked the fat up from a beautiful woman sitting in a rainy parking lot near one of my city’s famous agricultural markets. I knew what I was buying by weight, but I couldn’t picture the volume, so I went with my partner and our car. The load ended up being perfectly sufficient for a metro ride with a large shopping bag, or maybe two tote bags. The clouds were low around the evergreen of Montreal’s copper church spires and everything was blue. I was grateful, anyway, for the company.
The fat arrived frozen, so I let it defrost in my fridge for a day and a half. The fat — especially the tallow — was still very hard after this time, and I wondered if maybe it was still frozen — but when I cut the bag open, I found it to be workable. The texture of chilled butter.
I initially had it in my head that I would make a massive quantity of pemmican — pounds and pounds of it, enough to stock up. Enough for this trip and many more. I would be prepared. I needed a pound of tallow per pound of dried meat. But how much tallow would render from this fat? I had no idea.
I knew I had to break the suet down to small pieces and render it on a low heat for many hours. Various instructions I found online indicated that the fastest way to break the suet down was to run it through a food processor. I had a food processor — I’d actually found it in the trash, in perfect working order. Running the fat through the cheese grater attachment felt cruel, though. I wanted to spend more time with the animal.
I was mesmerized by the beauty of the fat. It wasn’t just white, like I expected — things are never just one colour. A grey sky is never just grey. A grey sky is grey, but also blue, and pink, and white. Yellow and teal and indigo. The fat was white, and a dozen different tender shades of pink. Orange and coral. It was shot through, in places, with little jewels of kidney that were themselves maroon and purple and burgundy and crimson. There was blue which would shock me, humble me, make me quiet.
My partner’s name is Alexander, but everyone calls him Sandy. We’re married — so his proper title is husband, I guess, but I also feel like this title comes with a cultural role and set of expectations, which relegates him to a status that can obfuscate his role as my closest friend and favourite intellectual and most enduring fascination. Anyway, Sandy, who is a painter and a CEGEP professor and the strangest person I’ve ever met, repeated a story told to him at a party by a doctor type, who said that the thing that the operating theatre videos, or crime scene photos, or images from slaughterhouses never really capture is the holy beauty of what’s inside of a living thing. There’s a horror, and a grief, when you open up a closed universe like that. That isn’t all there is. There’s also a beauty which is awesome in the biblical sense. There is also all of the colours.
There was a word on the bag that I read as swift. I was so caught up, in this communion, that I found myself wondering if this was the animal’s name — I felt like I could see him, after I lit my candle and said my prayers and made the air worth his death with precious herbs.
Swift, I addressed him, as I felt the grief and the gratitude and the awesome beauty.
I am honoured to ferry these parts of you back to everything, I told him. I promise this isn’t for nothing.
It wasn’t until later, when the kidney pieces were carved out and packed for my dog’s dinner, and the fat was already giving up its oils on the low fire under my best iron pot, that I realized the bag said suet. To differentiate it from the subcutaneous fat still vacuum packed in my refrigerator.
Suet has to be cooked down into tallow on a low heat for many hours so that the oils leave the cell membrane of the organ without scorching the flesh, which will ruin the taste. I gave it seven hours, or so, which was more than enough — and then fished the pale golden pieces of his body out of the tallow I made. People call this removing impurities, as if there can be an impure part of something like that. The resultant soft-simmered organ pieces are called cracklings, and I put them in my freezer for future uses — people, especially of the keto persuasion, eat them as snacks. The thought honestly makes my liver hurt — but I’m sure a tablespoon or two will add magic to some future stew. I owe it to the animal.
I ran the oil through a series of sieves — I knew tallow dried hard and would be difficult to chip out of a deep container, so I cooled it in a ceramic baking dish, popped it out with a paring knife, and broke it — with a series of unctuous tunks — into thick shards, with my hands.
Here is what I have learned from the first wave of my apprenticeship in beef fat: my suet offered a more complete render — gave up more oil — than my back fat. Both provided a white, glossy fat which were very close to each other in texture. The back fat had a slightly yellower cast. The suet fat felt finer, like a fine white chocolate, while the back fat felt more like a coagulated oil.
The suet had an overall more neutral taste, a taste closer to nothing — there was the slightest hint of a taste to it which was mostly cow with some overtones of bitterness, or funk. This may be because I cooked it for a little too long, and it may just be a quality of fat from that part of the body.
The back fat was slightly more pliable and spreadable in its fridge-chilled state, from which I extrapolated it may be more likely to melt on a voyage. It had a much more noticeable smell and taste than the suet tallow — and that smell and taste was incredible. It was sweet, and rich. It was mouth-wateringly gorgeous. I wanted to have the taste of the back fat and the stability of the suet, so I decided I would use a 60-40 split, suet-to-back fat, for this first experiment.
Traditionally, pemmican is made with long strips of meat, cut with the grain of the muscle fibres, and then dried in the line of smoke from a fire. The meat for pemmican should be as lean as possible, and there are some cuts which are more suitable than others. Suitable cuts from most of my go-to farms would have been extremely expensive — you need as many as 6 pounds of fresh meat to make the single pound of dried meat required for the recipe. So I made it with ground beef, instead, which I can get from high-welfare animals for about $5.80/375g, when I order in bulk from a local farm. The bulk order is 10 packages of meat. The recipe demanded at least 7 packages. My dreams of having a huge stock of pemmican pre-prepared fell away, and I decided to just start with one.
This part felt less romantic, to me — I basically just separated the beef into smaller patties, salted and peppered them, and then dried them in my oven on the lowest possible heat with the door to the oven cracked open with a wooden lemon juicer. The whole process took basically the entire time I was awake in a single day — I babied it a few times, to slice the cooked-but-not-dried meat into smaller pieces before it got too hard to break down without a food processor. I wished I’d gotten to spend the time with the animal I’d gotten to spend cutting up the fat. It seemed impersonal.
Once the meat was very dry, and only a little burnt, I tried to process it into a powder in my food processes — and blew out the motor, after a few minutes of trying. Easy come, easy go, I guess. Undeterred, I processed it in my teeny-weeny one-shot blender, which I also found in the garbage, and was so small I wasn’t able to overload it. The next day I did a secondary dry-out of the powder, just to be sure it was really dehydrated. When it was a rich brown, and there seemed to be no moisture left at all, I moved on.
I combined the powder in a bowl with a tablespoon of salt. I didn’t use any spices this time. I measured out 425 grams of tallow, melted it, and then dumped it into the meat without thinking — it was only then that I checked the instructions, and saw that I was only supposed to include enough fat to wet the meat, and not leave any pools. My meat was swimming in fat.
I’d dried more meat than I needed, had some remainder — after adding this, the tallow still drowned the meat in wide pools. I remembered my earlier, aborted pemmican attempt — the one I’d called off when I couldn’t find suet — and grabbed the dried meat and berry mixture that had been waiting in my fridge. This was sufficient — left me with a product which had only a few superficial pools on the top, which I could just scrape off when I cut it into bars. Feeling fancy, I topped it with some hickory-smoked salt, and left it to set.
My goal had been to make bars that were about 400 calories each — my recipe, divided up into approximately 16, give or take a few calories from the extra meat and berries I’d needed to use. Upon tasting the first bar, which came out crumbly (I didn’t lay down any parchment paper to make it easier to remove it from my baking dish, had to indelicately chip out the finished product), I realized that an entire 400 calorie bar might be an intimidating thing to get down. The pemmican did not taste bad at all — it was a little bland, but also smokey, and protein-rich. Greasy, in a not-unpleasant way. It would be very satisfying, I imagined, when one was very hungry. But it was also a real mouthful — a broad, intimidating kind of feeling, which went straight for my hunger and took care of it, while offering no comfort to the parts of me which wanted to eat for other reasons, like solace, or entertainment
I opted instead to make 24 bars, much smaller — my plan was not, after all, to eat pemmican on my trip exclusively. My plan was to use it as a backbone to whatever groceries I picked up on the way. They packed neatly into the small, reusable bags I’d purchased for this purpose. I packed them, and journeyed off.
Days later, I wandered Jericho beach in the early morning with the pemmican in my pocket. My father told me a story once that stuck with me — of driving, with his siblings, and his mother, and seeing an animal crushed into the asphalt of the road — struck, and left, by the tires of a car. Ew, the children said. Mmm, their mother joked. Pemmican.
I want to say she was from a different world — but she was from the same one, she just lived in it differently. She and her mother had done what they could to make money. They did things, including harvesting roadkill to make pemmican, to get through the winter. Sometimes I tell people this and they don’t know what to think — should they feel sorry for them? Should I? Mostly I’m just very impressed.
The history of what was in my pocket is so old. It’s older than anyone really knows. Stories about it can be interpreted different ways — has it been nine, ten, thirty thousand years? Since time immemorial? Fitness types talk about sugar like it’s just been invented, how sweetness isn’t really found in nature — but there were stories being told over clay pots, turning maple sap to syrup, on this continent, nine thousand years ago.
I watch the Salish fishermen cast their crab traps into the water at Jericho beach. They throw handfuls of spent bait to where a seal bobs like a dog in the dark womb of the water. I see sweetness everywhere. It is very common in nature, actually. Even death is a gift, if you’re standing at the right angle.
Tomorrow, the fishermen will come to their traps. Their modern equipment, in an ancient configuration. They will set free all the crabs who have not lived long enough and they will scuttle, in the sand, towards freedom. My grandmother and I have the same face. Hers is past so recent it’s still here. I think about my next batch of pemmican. The past readies itself to arrive from the future.