Is Pemmican the Ultimate Survival Food?

Now here’s a video DIY I might just have to try myself. It’s all about pemmican, which is essentially a preserved food of concentrated meat and fat… talk about the perfect food for me! I guess you could say pemmican was the Spam of its day.

This is actually a series of short videos, with the first one educating us about what pemmican is and what it’s good for. It calls pemmican “the ultimate survival food” and goes on to tell us why, along with some history of pemmican, which began with the American Indians. After being prepared and placed in rawhide bags with buffalo tallow poured over it, it could last as long as 20 or 30 years!

Part 2 (below) purports to tell us how we can prepare pemmican to eat at home, in camp, or even at historical reenactments. But it begins with even more history, which is not a bad thing.

He takes some really delicious-looking dried meat and breaks it up into a sort of meat powder, which I confess I would eat with a spoon. I could never make pemmican; I’d eat up all the meat before the recipe could be completed.

On to the third installment, which tells us how to use pemmican to prepare rubaboo (a sort of stew or soup once widely consumed by fur traders and Métis natives). Yummy…

In the final pemmican video, which is another short-and-sweet one, we learn about rousseau or pemmican hash, another popular pemmican dish from back in the day. And true to form, we begin with a Townsends history lesson to learn about the history of rousseau and how it earned its name.

I can’t say his rubaboo looked great to me, but his rousseau had me salivating.

Must… have… pemmican…

Russ Chastain

Editor & Contributing Writer Russ Chastain is a lifelong hunter and shooter who has spent his life learning about hunting, shooting, guns, ammunition, gunsmithing, reloading, and bullet casting. He started toting his own gun in the woods at age nine and he's pursued deer with rifles since 1982, so his hunting knowledge has been growing for more than three and a half decades. His desire and ability to share this knowledge with others has also grown, and Russ has been professionally writing and editing original hunting & shooting content since 1998. Russ Chastain has a passion for sharing accurate, honest, interesting hunting & shooting knowledge and stories with people of all skill levels.