page_title: Pemmican
section_title: Traditional preparation
hierarchical_section_title: Pemmican / Traditional preparation
caption_attribution_description: Preparing pemmican at Calgary Stampede. Traditionally, pemmican was prepared from the lean meat of large game such as buffalo, elk or deer. The meat was cut in thin slices and dried over a slow fire, or in the hot sun until it was hard and brittle. In some cases, dried fruits such as saskatoon berries, cranberries, blueberries, or choke cherries were pounded into powder and then added to the meat/fat mixture. The resulting mixture was then packed into rawhide pouches for storage.
context_page_description: Pemmican is a mixture of tallow, dried meat and dried berries used as a nutritious food. Historically, it was an important part of indigenous cuisine in certain parts of North America, and is still prepared today. The word comes from the Cree word pimîhkân, which itself is derived from the word pimî, "fat, grease". The Lakota word is wasná, originally meaning "grease derived from marrow bones", with the wa- creating a noun, and sná referring to small pieces that adhere to something. It was invented by the Indigenous peoples of North America.
  Pemmican was widely adopted as a high-energy food by Europeans involved in the fur trade and later by Arctic and Antarctic explorers, such as Captain Robert Bartlett, Ernest Shackleton, Richard E. Byrd, Fridtjof Nansen, Robert Falcon Scott, George W. DeLong and Roald Amundsen.
context_section_description: Traditionally, pemmican is prepared from the lean meat of large game such as bison, elk, deer, or moose. The meat is cut in thin slices and dried, either over a slow fire or in the hot sun until it was hard and brittle. About 5 pounds (2,300 g) of meat are required to make 1 pound (450 g) of dried meat suitable for pemmican. This thin brittle meat is known in Cree as Pânsâwân and colloquially in North American English as "dry meat". The Pânsâwân was then spread across tanned animal hide pinned to the ground, where it is beaten with flails or ground between two large stones till it turned into very small pieces, almost powder-like in its consistency. The pounded meat is mixed with melted fat in an approximate 1:1 ratio by volume. Typically the melted fat would be suet that has been rendered into tallow. In some cases, dried fruits, such as blueberries, chokecherries, cranberries, or Saskatoon berries, were pounded into powder and then added to the meat/fat mixture. The resulting mixture is then packed into rawhide bags for storage where it would cool, and then harden into pemmican. Today, some people store their pemmican in glass jars or tin boxes. Since there is no "official" recipe for pemmican, the shelf life can vary depending on ingredients and storage conditions. At room temperature, pemmican can generally last from one to five years, but there are anecdotal stories of pemmican stored in cool cellars being safely consumed after a decade or more.  If vacuum sealed (e.g., in an MRE), it can still be edible after more than a century.
  A bag of bison pemmican weighing about 90 lb (41 kg) was called a taureau (French for "bull") by the Métis of Red River. These bags of taureaux (lit. "bulls"), when mixed with fat from the udder, were known as taureaux fins, when mixed with bone marrow, as taureaux grand, and when mixed with berries, as taureaux à grains. It generally took the meat of one bison to fill a taureau.
caption: Traditional method of drying meat for pemmican demonstrated at Calgary Stampede
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