Personal mysteries
Saturday, 24 March 2018
My first mystery: what is this flower called? I don’t ever remember an ID on it…. Kinda like a stalk of violets…which seems impossible.
My other mystery: pemmican. I read about a buffalo jump (stone walls for driving bison to a cliff, where they’d fall and be butchered) near Cut Bank, Montana…which we remember for the giant penguin statue (yeah, Goo it!). The archaeologists concluded that the folks processed the carcasses for several special items, including bone grease. For pemmican.
Just how many paleo-diet freaks today make bone grease? An almost lost art?
The pemmican brings up one of those repeating topics I think about…how folks preserve food so it doesn’t spoil and yet remains tasty (or a version of tasty). A culture’s food specialties are in two categories that smear together. One is the food served on a given day. The other is the way fresh foods are preserved, for example: wine, cheese, dried meat, pickled eggs, sauerkraut/kimchee, salted fish/meat, soy sauce…that kind of thing. Cannot require canning (for example) to preserve…. The cuisine then can use both preserved foods and fresh foods together….
Anyway.