And when Biindnerfleisch and schinken 
are sliced paper thin, they resemble a 
fine prosciutto of extreme mildness. 
Northern Italians serve the same deli- 
cacy under the name bresaola. 
In the Americas, where the jerking of 
meat antedates Columbus, Indians cut 
the flesh of various game animals very 
thin so that they could dry it in the heat 
of the sun. Hopis still jerk mutton, beef, 
venison, and rabbit. In our day, some 
cooks in Hopiland practice oven jerking. 
They marinate meat that has been cut 
across the grain in '/s-inch slices, then 
put it on a rack set in a pan and bake it 
in a 1 50-degree oven for six hours with 
the door ajar. The meat has to be turned 
every two hours. It turns leathery dry 
and can be eaten as is. Hopis also cook 
jerky in some fairly elaborate recipes — 
roasted and served with chili and tortil- 
las, in tamales, in hash or stews, boiled 
in bite-sized pieces and mixed into drop 
dumplings, or boiled until tender and 
then pounded to shreds, or chopped in a 
blender and combined with cornmeal 
gravy. 
Plains Indians jerked buffalo before 
the great herds were destroyed forever 
by white hunters. Lewis and Clark also 
jerked buffalo meat when they could get 
it, and reported that it kept much longer 
than jerked elk. By the late nineteenth 
century, when the buffalo were gone, 
the federal government supplied Indians 
with beef as a substitute, and they dried 
it in the ancestral manner of their cul- 
tures. 
Sometimes Indians used jerky as the 
main ingredient of pemmican (from a 
Cree word whose root means fat), an 
almost imperishable concoction consist- 
ing essentially of chipped jerky mixed 
with melted fat, usually stored in a hide 
sack. Arctic explorers packed pemmi- 
can on their expeditions. They would 
order it by the ton from north country 
outfitters, who dressed the stuff up with 
fruit or raisins and sugar. Even so, pem- 
mican seems to have nauseated explor- 
ers and possibly contributed to the 
deaths of some of those who ate a steady 
diet of it for months on end and, accord- 
ing to one survivor, succumbed to pro- 
tein poisoning. 
In early America, especially in the 
isolated homesteads of the plains and 
prairies, slightly more settled folk dried 
meat in large batches. Louise K. Nickey, 
in Cookery of the Prairie Homesteader , 
recalls that when she was growing up on 
a farm in northeastern Montana before 
World War I, her mother would dice a 
cup of dried beef, simmer it in two cups 
of water for nearly an hour and then 
serve it in a skilletful of milk gravy, 
along with buttermilk biscuits. 
When I was growing up, one occasion- 
ally encountered a survival of this dish, 
made from a commercial dried beef 
called chipped beef. Old-fashioned 
cookbooks often feature recipes for such 
things as creamed chipped beef on toast. 
And modern supermarkets still sell 
chipped beef, which now tends to be 
smoked, rather than air-dried, and typi- 
cally comes in jars. But to my mind, 
chipped beef still counts as a survival 
from pioneer days, when midwestem 
and western settlers fried jerky in little 
shreds until it began to curl at the edges. 
The technical term for this is “friz- 
zling.” Once cooked in this way, or 
reconstituted through boiling, the beef 
could be combined with a whole range 
of foods, mostly starch or vegetables, to 
give them a protein boost and a crunchy, 
salty taste. 
All through this hemisphere, cooks 
have done much the same thing with 
beef jerky. In Brazil, for instance, jerky 
shreds are mixed with toasted manioc or 
cornmeal (see recipe). And the national 
dish of Brazil, that black bean feast 
called feijoada, canonically includes 
jerky ( xarque or came seca in Portu- 
guese) along with various smoked meats 
and pork oddments. 
Jerky is native to Latin America. The 
word itself derives from charqui, the 
Quechua name for air-dried meat. One 
imagines that Spanish explorers discov- 
ered it when they conquered the Que- 
chua-speaking Incas of the Andes, 
adopted the word (which is still current 
in Spanish), and exported the process to 
the American Southwest. 
To this day, in Latin America, people 
1 pound jerked beef 
2 tablespoons bacon fat 
1 tablespoon butter 
1 grated onion 
Salt 
Malagueta pepper (or cayenne) 
1 Vi cups toasted manioc meal or corn- 
meal 
1 . Cut meat in pieces, trim off excess 
fat, and wash well. Soak overnight in 
cold water. 
2. Next morning, hold under running 
cold water, then dry. 
3. Heat bacon fat and butter in a heavy 
skillet. Saute onion until it begins to 
jerk most available meats, not only beef 
and pork but also the rhea, an ostrich- 
like bird of the Argentine pampas, and 
the guanaco, a cameloid relative of the 
llama, whose flesh is said to resemble 
veal in taste. Guanaco is particularly 
prized in the extreme south of South 
America, where, reportedly, the meat of 
tough older animals is considered espe- 
cially desirable when jerked and per- 
mitted to go slightly rancid. 
In the West Indies, jerked beef also 
has an honorable history. The French 
colonizers called it boucan , the source of 
our word buccaneer , presumably be- 
cause the pirates of the Antilles found 
jerked beef a convenience food in their 
fast-moving, homeless way of life. In 
official French, the original Quechua 
word survives as charquer, “to air dry 
meat.” Probably it came into the French 
language as a result of New World 
contact between Spanish and French 
colonists. 
It appears, then, that throughout the 
Western Hemisphere in the age of ex- 
ploration, jerky was a meat that every- 
one ate. It was the most primitive and 
therefore the most appropriate form of 
cured meat. Today, when we continue to 
eat more technologically sophisticated 
preserved meats — corned beef, pas- 
trami, and smoked ham — because we 
like their taste, we should probably pay 
just as much attention to jerky, the 
typical meat of the frontier and an esti- 
mable alternative, even in the computer 
age, to a hamburger. 
Raymond Sokolov’s new book, Fading 
Feasts ( Farrar Straus and Giroux), is a 
collection of food columns that first 
appeared in Natural History. 
brown. Then add meat pieces and 
cook over low heat. Stir with a fork, 
adding a few drops of boiling water 
from time to time as liquid evapo- 
rates. When the meat is brown and 
tender and almost dry, add salt and 
chopped malagueta pepper (or cay- 
enne) to taste. Turn into a mortar 
and pound the meat to fine shreds or 
chop in blender. 
4. Add the manioc or cornmeal a little 
at a time, until the mixture is the 
consistency of bread crumbs. Serve 
immediately. 
Yield: 4-6 servings 
Pa?oca de Came Seca 
(Adapted from Brazilian Cookery, Traditional and Modern, 
by Margarette de Andrade) 
