In the last little while, I've been enjoying the blog, Ridin out the Recession. I heartily recommend bookmarking it and visiting often! It's been a fantastic read.
It's a blog that has got me to thinking food again. If you've been following either of my blogs for a while, you may have noticed I have an interest in food history. You can learn alot about people by what they eat, how they prepare their food, and the customs and traditions surrounding food. I find it fascinating.
Ridin out the Recession, in their posts talking about different ways to put up food for the future, has reminded me about this a lot. Our modern society, with its technologies and international trade, has not only made an astounding variety of foods available to us, but it has made preparing and preserving our food for the future much easier, more consistent and safer. Modern canning methods sure have improved from the days I helped my mother top her jars of jam with a piece of string and paraffin wax! (The string was allowed to hang outside the jar so you could pull the wax up to "open" the jar - but sometimes the wax would just break apart, and we'd have to use a knife to get the rest out, then fish little bits of wax off the top later on.)
Not too many people preserve food anymore, beyond sticking things into the freezer, though doing so was regaining interest even before the global economy tanked. Much like traditional crafts often see a resurgence in popularity after being displaced by industrial versions, increased numbers of people have found that these old methods are satisfying and enjoyable skills. It feels darn good to do things for yourself! Being able to grow a garden, then fill your pantry with food for another day really does something for you! Even those who aren't DIY'ers are increasingly appreciative of hand made items.
I love old cookbooks. While I enjoy recreating historical recipes, some of my favorites are just a generation or two old. As much as I like the recipes in modern cookbooks, I find myself less willing to try them out. With so many of them written and published in the US, for example, they tend to call for ingredients that aren't so easy to find in Canada, if they're available here at all. New cookbooks also tend to use a lot of packaged ingredients. While the use of canned, bottled or powdered ingredients makes things handy, we just don't buy a lot of prepared foods. I have little interest in buying them just to try out a recipe.
The old cookbooks don't have these prepared ingredients, since they didn't exist at the time. Of course, there's also the problem of the old recipes using ingredients that were common then, but aren't anymore! Others are foods that were common and cheap at the time, but are now expensive, luxury items. Like rabbit!
Among my favorite cookbooks is The Canadiana Cookbook, by Mme Jehane Benoit, published in 1970. This was one of those flea market finds that are such treasures. The book is organized by province and territory, with plenty of Mme Benoit's wonderful commentaries strewn about.
In the Manitoba section, she has a recipe for Pemmican (Chippewa), which she in turn found in the Prairie Pantry cook book. Pemmican played a huge part in Canadian development and trade, and in Metis culture. Many of our modern highways closely follow the Pemmican trails - the Metis trade routes. Pemmican was a vital food for a very long time, and was originally made using bison, elk or venison.
I haven't tried this recipe yet. In the cookbook, Mme Benoit says she made it using smoked venison instead of beef. If you give it a try, please let me know how it turned out!
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Pemmican (Chippewa)
The Canadiana Cookbook, pages 144-145
1 pound dried beef or smoked venison
3/4 pound dried crushed chokecherries*
1/2 pound fresh beef suet, chopped fine
1/2 cup light brown or natural sugar
Pass all through meat grinder, except the sugar. Add the sugar. Mix thoroughly. Pack in a bowl and keep covered and refrigerated. Serve with sourdough bread.
* I dry my own chokecherries in a 200 F oven. They are usually easy to find in Health Food stores. Dried currants can replace them, or fresh lingonberries when available.
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Well, I don't know if you can get chokecherries in health food stores anymore. Besides her recommended alternatives, cranberries, saskatoons and blueberries can be used, too. The fruit is actually optional, and a more modern addition. This is the only recipe I've seen that uses sugar.
We've made our own beef jerky, and if you want to dry your own meat, it's easy to do. Get a cut of very lean meat, such as flank steak, and cut it very thin, against the grain (partially freeze the meat to make it easier to cut, if you want). We laid wire cake racks over cookie sheets, then spread the meat out over them evenly. After letting the oven warm up to the lowest setting (about 150 - 200 F), we put the meat in and left it overnight with the oven light on, but the oven off. The oven can be heated back up as needed, though it just needs to be warm, not hot enough to actually cook the meat. If you take the meat out to turn it, though, make sure to warm it back up again. It can take a very long time to thoroughly dry the meat (I've seen as long as 15 hours - we didn't take as long with our jerky, since we wanted it to still be chewable).
In the days before meat grinders and food processors, the dried meat would be pounded into a powder. The fat would be rendered and everything would be put into special leather bags and mixed together.
Pemmican was valuable because it was extremely nutritious, portable and, properly wrapped, could last 4-5 years. It can be eaten as is, though I've read of the Voyageurs adding it to boiling water to make a soup.
I don't know how economical it would be to make pemmican now, with how much meat costs these days. At least for someone who has to get their meat at the grocery store. For a hunter or beef farmer, it might be a practical way to preserve some trail food.
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