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Eve Richardson wrote:

Way off track, coming as it does from Canada, but I guess you've looked at pemmican and akutaq. Hunter and gatherer food. I don't know if the fats were rendered. Whipped? Does that imply rendering?

Also, storage in bladders, udders, intestines? Of course, the climate in northern Canada is a bit cooler than the Biblical world, but in India butter is rendered to ghee; does that make it keep better in the heat?

Rendering butter by heating it drives off the water in it. This prevents hydrolytic rancidity, so ghee lasts longer than butter. But it doesn't prevent oxidative rancidity.

The distorted Common Agricultural Policy of the EU results in surplus foods being bought up and stored, among them butter, forming the notorious 'butter mountain'. The butter is rendered and kept under refrigeration. A few years ago some of the mountain was sold off at a low price. A friend of mine bought some and used it to make shortbread, with horrible results. Oxidative rancidity had given it a strong rank flavour reminiscent of burning Bakelite.

Incidentally, I repeated my query about 'distilling a pig' (see this list, 25 February) on another forum and it was suggested that the end product of boiling down pig offal with dates and sugar would have some resemblance to pemmican. There probably wouldn't have been much fat in the mixture, though, as it was made with all the entrails apart from the guts, the more high-value bits of the pig having been used elsewhere.

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