About a year ago my boys discovered the joys of beef jerky. A Sunday School teacher introduced them to the protein-packed snack, and ever since, we”ve had a package in the house for them to snack on after school. They love the salty taste and the chewy goodness. Yet every time I see them gnawing on a piece, I smile because in my mind, I see a cowboy, mountain man, or trapper out on the trail.
Native Americans taught the early settlers how to preserve meat by rubbing it with salt and drying it either over a smoking campfire or simply hanging strips
to dry in the sun and wind. The most common game meats used included bison, deer, and elk. Instead of eating the dried meat in strips, many Indian tribes preferred to use it to make pemmican.
To make pemmican, they would pound the strips of dried meat between a pair of rocks until it was shredded and nearly pulverized. They would add dried berries to the mixture then mix it with hot marow grease to bind it all together. They would pack this mixture into a pouch made from bison stomach or intestine and seal it with hot grease. As ith epouch dries, a vacuum is created which can preserve the pemmican for several years. They
would add this to stews or soups or even eat it straight from the pouch when travelling. It”s small size and light weight made it perfect for warriors on the go.
The Hudson”s Bay Company bought huge amounts of pemmican to supply to their trappers who were constantly on the move and required to pack their supplies on their own backs. The protein from the meat, vitamins from the berries, and the energy source from the fat, made this an efficient yet very nutiricously balanced food product.
During the time of westward expansion, travelers would stretch strips of meat across their covered wagons to dry (taking about 2-3 days), or sometimes they would call a stop for half a day in order to build a scaffold and smoke the meat for 3-4 hours. This allowed them to make the most of whatever game they were able to hunt and to preserve the leftovers for consumption farther down the trail when game became scarse.
There is some disagreement about how this dried meat became known as jerky. Some say the Incas first named it in the 1500s, calling it “Ch”arki” which means dried meat. Others say that the Spanish explorers coined the phrase “Charqui” to North America when they noticed the Indians drying meat in a similar fashion to they methods they used with goat meat to store it aboard ship. The name took on different pronunciations until it finally landed on jerky.
So what about you? Are you a fan of jerky? Have you ever eaten jerky made of something other than beef? Anyone ever tried pemmican?