Traditional Pemmican

Ch’itsuh or pemmican - photo by Mary Jane Moses from Old Crow
Ch’itsuh or pemmican – photo by Mary Jane Moses from Old Crow
Mary Jane Moses of Old Crow shared her pemmican recipe here.

PEMMICAN
Submitted by Kathy and Michael Gates. 
This recipe comes from “Yukon Cookbook” by Leona Kananen first published first in 1971 and reprinted in 1975 and 1978.

Best Made in August.

  1. First dry the meat.
  2. Cut meat into strips and hang over pole over a slow fire of dry willow; keep turning meat until well dried and smoked.
  3. Cook meat in boiling water for 10 minutes. Pound well with hammer or axe, and mix with marrow or grease.
  4. Add chopped onions or berries, if you like.
  5. Put pemmican into packages, into a pan or into a moose stomach.
  6. Freeze; cut into slices.
David Millar adds:
A recipe for Pemmican from the Northern Cookbook of 1975
  1. Pound dried moose or deer meat on a piece of clean canvas or stone, to fine crumbs.
  2. Pour hot melted moose fat over in pan.
  3. Let freeze. Serve cold.
Very rich. I suspect you could add berries and dried fruit to sweeten the pemmican.

Moose Pemmican

Sylvia Frisch shared some of her delicious moose pemmican with Suzanne. It’s made by Jimmy Johnny of Mayo.
Ingredients: moose meat, moose fat, and kinnikinnick berries.
 
Sylvia Freisch's pemmican. From FirstWeEat.ca, the Food Security North of 60 website supporting First We Eat, a documentary by Yukon filmmaker Suzanne Crocker about eating only locally-grown foods in in Dawson City, Yukon, in Canada's North, for one year.
Sylvia Freisch's pemmican. From FirstWeEat.ca, the Food Security North of 60 website supporting First We Eat, a documentary by Yukon filmmaker Suzanne Crocker about eating only locally-grown foods in in Dawson City, Yukon, in Canada's North, for one year.
 
Top