Definition

1. Noun:
   • A concentrated food mixture: A traditional, high-energy food made by pounding lean, dried meat (often game such as bison, deer, or elk) into a fine powder and then mixing it with melted fat. It is a preserved, portable foodstuff.
   • A condensed or concentrated form of something: (Figurative) Something that is dense, concentrated, or packed with substance, such as a concise summary or a very rich piece of information.

Examples of Usage

• Noun (Literal):
  • The explorers survived the harsh winter by eating pemmican.
  • Pemmican was a staple food for many Plains tribes, providing essential nutrients on long journeys.
• Noun (Figurative):
  • His lecture was intellectual pemmican, dense with ideas and difficult to digest all at once.
  • The report is a pemmican of the year's most critical financial data.

Advanced Usage

• "To make pemmican": The process of creating this food.
  • They learned how to make pemmican from dried bison meat and berries.
• Used to describe extreme conciseness.
  • His writing style is so compressed it's like literary pemmican.

Variants and Related Words

• Pemican: An alternate, less common spelling of the same word.
• Jerky: A related food of dried meat strips, but not pounded and mixed with fat like pemmican.
• Biltong: A similar air-dried meat product from Southern Africa.

Synonyms

• Concentrated food
• Travel ration
• Meat cake (descriptive)
• (Figurative) Condensation, Digest, Compendium

Related Phrases

• Pemmican bag: A bag used to store or carry pemmican.
  • The pemmican was kept safe in a leather pemmican bag.

Related Idioms

• To be (like) pemmican: To be very dense, rich, or concentrated in content.
  • That philosophy text is pemmican; you can only read a few pages at a time.

Noun

1. lean dried meat pounded fine and mixed with melted fat; used especially by North American Indians