Dry meat and bone grease

As tradition built it

Dry meat and bone grease

Dene

Ingredients

The tradition's method, with the ingredients named. Quantities follow as we verify them.

Dry meat

• caribou muscles, separated

Bone grease

• caribou bones

Pounded dry meat

• berries

Method

Dry meat

1. Hang the separated muscles about a day, turning them so both sides dry. It firms the meat and makes it easier to cut.
2. With a very sharp filleting knife, kept sharp with a file, cut with the grain to unravel the meat into thin sheets.
3. Hang the sheets to dry, turning them and thinning them again where they need it. On the land the meat is smoked as it dries; in town it is often dried indoors and frozen.

Bone grease

4. Split each bone in half with a chisel and hammer, so it splinters less, and throw away the splinters. Chop the joints.
5. Put the bones in a covered roaster and cook on high for about 3 hours.
6. Set the roaster tilted on the table so the grease settles. Lift out the bones, pour the grease into a container, and pick out the last fragments with tweezers.

Pounded dry meat

7. Pound the dry meat into very small pieces. Fat and berries are often added. It is etsï in Tłı̨chǫ and itsuh in Gwich'in.

Notes

Genuinely related to, but independently developed from, Plains pemmican rather than a copy of it.

The dry meat and the roasted bone grease are from Alfred Masuzumi's account, collected from elders in Délı̨nę and Fort Good Hope, for the Sahtú Renewable Resources Board; the pounding is from the Government of the Northwest Territories' Dene Way of Life guide. Dorothy Frost of Old Crow boils the grease instead: bones pounded under 13cm on a flat rock, boiled hard 2 to 3 hours in an enamel pot with ice or snow added again and again, the grease spooned off and strained through cheesecloth. No source measures the meat, grease and berries together.

What a modern chef changes

Big Green Egg-rendered bone fat, pressed into a terrine

Rung 03

Method

1. Roast marrow bones, beef or venison, in a Big Green Egg run low and indirect, exactly the three hours the Dene method specifies, with a drip tray beneath to catch the render.
2. Strain and clarify the fat.
3. Pound dehydrator-dried venison, from the nikku recipe, in a mortar, or pulse briefly in a food processor for consistency.
4. Work the rendered bone fat through it by hand while both are still warm, folding in dried or freeze-dried blueberries at the end.
5. Serve pressed into a terrine mould and sliced, rather than loose, the one genuinely modernist liberty this elevation takes, and one that changes presentation rather than the underlying method.