Last year I made the ultimate survival food pemmican,
dried bison meat and fat pressed into a brick
that's meant to last for a long time.
While it's been a long time, a year in fact, and now I am going to use it
to make rubaboo the pemmican stew of Canadian mounties and explorers.
So thank you to Hellofresh for sponsoring this video as I hope my pemmican hasn't gone rancid,
this time on Tasting History.
So at the end of last year's video I tasted the pemmican and frankly it was
greasy and kind of bland but I also mentioned several ways to spruce it up.
Often they would add sugar when making the pemmican but if you already had your pemmican made
you could add it as an ingredient to other dishes and perhaps the most famous of those dishes
is rubaboo.
Hey rubaboo!
Now where exactly this term comes from is a matter of conjecture but many people agree that it is probably
a combination of the French roux meaning something that can help thicken a sauce or a stew,
and aboo which was a term for different types of soup in several Algonquin languages.
And the fact that this is possibly an amalgam of two very different languages
is fitting because the dish itself is an amalgam of two very different cultures.
It was first made by the Métis who were the people descended from both the indigenous of Canada
as well as the European traders who came to Canada in the 16th and 17th centuries.
And as the Métis worked closely with the Traders and explorers of the 18th and 19th centuries.
it's no wonder that both pemmican and rubaboo became staples for anyone venturing out into the Canadian wilderness.
Now finding historic mentions of this dish is kind of difficult,
one because there are a lot of spellings including
rababou, robbiboe and rababoo.
Another reason is that sometimes it's just called pemmican stew and when I could find mentions they're hardly recipes.
Like in the 1821 diary entry from British Trader Nicholas Gary
"Our men are now eating Rababoo made of pemmican and flour."
Survey says not a recipe.
A somewhat better description comes from Sam Steele a famous mountie and soldier,
and all-around badass in 1874.
"[Pemmican] was cooked in two ways in the west; one a stew of pemmican water flour and if they could be secured,
wild onions or preserved potatoes. This was called 'rubaboo'; the other was called by the plain hunters a 'rechaud.'
It was cooked in a frying pan with onions and potatoes or alone.
Some persons ate pemmican raw, but I must say that I never had a taste for it that way."
Other mentions from around this period talk about adding things like corn or different greens, and herbs and spices,
and sometimes beans, all sorts of things could go in to make it a rababu stew.
So really whatever you add is going to be fairly authentic because there is no real recipe.
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Now while I can get Hellofresh delivered right to my door, it was not an option
for the Canadian mounties in the 19th century stationed up in the Yukon and Northwest territories.
So if you want to eat like them what you'll need is: a half pound or 225 grams of pemmican.
And to make pemmican I will put a link in the description to last year's video where I made pemmican,
and explain how to do it because it's quite a lengthy process.
A half cup or 60 grams of flour, 2 onions diced, a few potatoes about two cups chopped,
some herbs and some salt and pepper to taste.
So first break up your pemmican into a bunch of little pieces.
I forgot just how greasy this stuff was to handle,
but it's a good thing because it's that greasy fat that's going to melt out when you put it into a pot over medium-high heat.
Keep it moving around until you start to smell it cooking.
Mine sort of smelled like cooking sausage early in the morning.
Then add in the onions and toss them around with the meat and the fat let them cook for about five minutes until they're lightly browned,
and then add in the flour and get everything well coated.
Now you can actually add all the ingredients into just some boiling water and you will have a rubaboo
but I find that cooking the onions and the meat beforehand is
going to really give you a lot of nice flavor and adding the flour after you add the water
it's not going to cook and so it's going to kind of taste floury,
and it can kind of clump it's just not going to thicken quite as well as adding it before.
Adding it at this point isn't exactly making a roux but it does allow it to mix with the fat and cook a bit so it's more like a roux.
After three or four minutes of cooking it should have a nice nutty flavor,
and then you can pour in about one liter or one quart of water.
If you want it a bit thinner just add more water but I am looking for a nice thick stew so I'm sticking to one quart.
Then add in the potatoes along with any herbs, or salt, or pepper that you care to add.
Then let it cook over a medium heat for about 20 minutes.
This will give the stew time to thicken up and it'll give us time to talk about the Canadian voyagers and mounties,
and how they ate their rubaboo.
So when I made last year's video on pemmican I really thought I had exhausted all of the
pemmican writings that I could find but boy was I wrong.
I came up with a lot of new things when I was doing research for this so I'm going to share some with you right now.
First are the writings of Robert Peary and Matthew Henson
two American explorers who made several expeditions to the Arctic together and claimed to have been the first explorers to reach the North Pole,
though there is question to whether they actually did make it to the actual North Pole.
Regardless they traveled a long way, it was really, really cold and their cheap foods were pemmican and hardtack.
[clack clack]
Now hardtack or biscuits as they were sometimes called were hard,
it's right there in the name, and so they had to often be cooked in some way or else
like dipped in water or tea just to soften them up,
and it turns out the pemmican sometimes was the same way too.
In Matthew Henson's writing from March 2nd 1909 as they crossed the ice of the Polar sea he said
"Breakfast had warmed us up a bit, but the hard pemmican had torn and cut the roofs and sides of our mouths,
so that we did not eat a full meal, and we decided that at our next camp we would boil the pemmican in the tea
and have a combination stew.
I will say now that this experiment was tried, but it made such an unwholesome mess that it was never repeated."
To be fair a very popular drink at the time was beef tea
so pemmican tea kind of makes sense I suppose, though obviously it didn't work out,
but also to be fair there is no tea in beef tea, it's just really beef and water and
some other ways boiling that down similar to
hot ham water,
but it's likely that the pemmican that they were eating up in the Arctic was not all beef or ham for that matter
because most of their pemmican came pre-tinned from American factories and
"No one but the makers knew how much cat, dog, mule, and horse meat masqueraded in the pemmican under the guise of beef."
But regardless of the meat variety it did not work to steep the pemmican in tea
but that doesn't mean that they didn't keep trying to make it into a stew or rubaboo.
On several occasions Henson says that "the evening meal of pemmican stew and tea was prepared,
the dogs were fed and we turned in."
What I find interesting is how two men who spent so much time together on this voyage
had two very different Recollections of exactly how they enjoyed their their pemmican.
See Robert Perry wrote that "In all my expeditions after the first one, when some members of the party made themselves sick by eating too much pemmican stew,
no attempt has been made at cooking or even warming the pemmican ration."
So maybe it was just Henson who cooked his pemmican into a rubaboobecause Perry does seem to have preferred it raw.
Frankly he just loved pemmican.
In his memoirs he says "Of all foods that I am acquainted with,
pemmican is the only one that, under appropriate conditions,
a man can eat twice a day for 365 days in a year and have the last mouthful taste as good as the first.
And it is the most satisfying food I know...
It has invariably been eaten like a piece of cake or pie, just as it came out of the tin."
To be fair cake at that time was a little bit drier than it is today but I still think the comparison is
little off base
but he loved pemmican. In fact when he was talking about how to to pack the dog sled
that was going to be taking him, he ditched his sleeping bag
"Thus allowing its equivalent weight of more pemmican to be carried."
I mean it's important I'll grant you
but so is a sleeping bag when you're gonna do that sleeping in the Arctic.
Another really interesting thing about his writings is the inclusion of a photo.
It shows how all of the different rations were packed so that they would stack on the sled.
There's compressed tea, condensed milk, pemmican,
oil, alcohol, dog pemmican, and hardtack.
[clack clack]
And when I say dog pemmican I do not mean that it was made from dogs
but rather that it was meant for the dogs to eat because Peary says that
"Pemmican is the only food for dogs on a serious polar sledge journey."
Now another person who wrote quite a bit about both pemmican and its use as rubaboo is the author of today's recipe Sam Steele
who not only had a really cool name, Sam Steele, but also had a really cool life.
He was famous for being a tough, stern, and no-nonsense kind of guy who was kind of like the Canadian version of Chuck Norris but instead of
being Walker Texas Ranger he was Sam Steele Canadian Mountie.
Not only did he fight in the Boer Wars and World War I
but he was also one of the first Canadian mounties to bring law and order to the wilds of western Canada,
and during the Klondike Gold Rush he earned the nickname Lion of the Yukon.
When he arrived in the town of Skagway in February 1898 it was 30 below zero,
and the "gambling hells, dance halls and variety theaters were in full swing.
'Soapy' Smith a 'bad man' and his gang of about 150 Ruffians ran the town and did what they pleased...
Robbery and murder were daily occurrences; many people came there with money, and next morning had not enough to get a meal,
having been robbed or cheated out of their last cent."
Sam Steele and Soapy Smith you can't make these names up they're just fantastic.
Anyway the Klondike Gold Rush at the very beginning was like most gold rushes of the past absolute pandemonium.
And then Sam Steele got to town.
Being Canadian he wasn't about to let that Gold Rush be an ill-mannered one,
so in just a few months he cleaned out the vermin and anyone who didn't follow his rules he sent packin.
He turned that place around and the Klondike Gold Rush is now famous for being one of the most orderly in history.
How very Canadian.
And while he was cleaning up the West and on all of these different adventures
he was often eating pemmican and rubaboo.
For "Pemmican [was] the favorite food of the traveler on the plains and far north, and the Mounted Police used it for years."
He tried to make sure that his men always had plenty of pemmican and flour so that they could make rubaboo,
but one time when they were on the river near Lake Winnipeg a terrible wind came that stopped them from progressing any further.
"It kept up for several days, and as we had only a few pounds of flour we were soon out of rations and had to shoot seagulls.
These and tea were all we had to keep us from starving."
But finally the wind subsided and they were able to move on to the next outpost.
"And here we procured a small supply of pemmican, tea, and flour...
[and that night] when meal time came, [we] landed to cook our stew of pemmican and flour and boil our tea."
So perhaps I should make myself a cup of tea as I dish up a bowl of rubaboo.
It should take about 20 minutes but you'll know that it's done when it's thickened up and the potatoes have become nice and tender.
And here we are the rubaboo of the Canadian wilderness.
I gotta say it does not look too appetizing.
It kind of reminds me of like black bean soup
but there are no black beans in it.
And it's not really soup, it's definitely a thick stew.
You can make a soup if you add more water...
but while it doesn't look appetizing it actually smells really, really good.
The whole house smells really good, just kind of smells like a meat stew.
And that's really what it is. It's just that the meat is
a year old and I'm about to eat it.
Okay here we go.
Get some of everything in there.
Hm.
The flavor is really good.
The texture of that meat is weird, it's kind of chewy.
What does it remind me of?
It reminds me of like ground beef...
that is really fatty. Like it has a lot of chew to it and it is a really fatty meat, so
that makes sense. But I'm actually surprised at how much I enjoy the flavor.
It's hardy.
I could see eating a big bowl of this.
Even now even more so if I was out in the Canadian Tundra.
It needs the onions and the potatoes and
a little bit of that spice and herbs otherwise I think it would be very, very bland
which you know is what it is but
if you've got some of those ingredients add them in sometimes they would have added corn, and lots of other things, other beans- black beans
and just to spruce it up. So add whatever you want, but you're still getting that pemmican flavor ,
it's just lifted by the other ingredients.
What I also find amazing is that this is year old meat and it tastes pretty much the same as it did the day that I that I made the the pemmican. So
that's kind of awesome, I think.
I'm curious if I get poisoned in the next few hours...
I don't think I will because with meat especially you can usually smell if something has gone off,
didn't smell, tastes great, go make some- go make some rubaboo
and if you don't want to make some at least say rubaboo because it's a lot of fun,
and I will see you next time on Tasting History.