ah ha the same site has a historical section with chippewa pemmican recipe in it whoop whoop
thanks mate great stuff
It's a nice idea in theory, and credit to the company for having a go.
I am a bit sceptical, however. They say:
This pemmican is made from locally reared venison and venison fat combined with cranberry's, blueberries and other mixed dried fruits, nuts, seeds and honey then formed into balls the recipe is an original Chippewa Indian recipe that goes back hundreds of years ...
If it's got all that stuff in it, the recipe unlikely to go back for "
hundreds of years".
The most reliable historical surveys tend towards the opinion that Native Americans probably didn't add berries for their own use, but that that was done when selling to Europeans. The Indians would probably have avoided adding them, because this was a food preservation method, and berries would have introduced moisture, which would not help the keeping properties. Pemmican made straight would keep for -- literally -- years.
However, adding fruit in effect it made the mix more like a pudding, to which Englishmen were used. (Meat puddings with dried fruit in are an old delicacy in England and are the origin of mince pies.)
Here's Stefansson's famous writing on pemmican and related subjects:
http://owndoc.com/pdf/The-fat-of-the-land.pdf
And this interview with Dr. Steve Phinney -- MP3 or transcript -- is good, too:
http://www.meandmydiabetes.com/2010...digenous-diets-will-become-public-in-2-weeks/
The recipe you link not only has cranberries but "other" -- what the heck is "other"? -- dried fruit ... and nuts ... and seeds. It sounds more like "trailmix" from Holland and Barrett than pemmican! It also includes honey. Well, the honey-bee seems not to have been around in pre-contact North America. Apparently, escaped bees, that had got away from white settlers, were moving around about 100 miles in advance of the frontier and the Indians came to dread their approach, knowing what it portended. They called them The White Man's Fly:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/America-Explorers-Language-Travel-Guides/dp/0486260313/
To be honest, this "pemmican" does sound like a bit of a carb-fest -- which, of course, the original pemmican was anything but.
Fresh cranberries and blueberries are actually fairly low-sugar fruit and good nutrition. But fruit when dried delivers a far higher glycemic load and is often packaged with additional sugar, too. The anonymous dried fruit -- "other" -- is likely worse so far as glycemic index goes. And how much honey's in there?
