When I was a little kid, my old man built a plywood box with pine trim that was about the size of a dishwasher. He mounted the box on casters, capped the front with a bottom-hinged door, and fitted the inside walls with enough runners to support eight sliding shelves made of wire mesh. He cut a rectangular hole into the top of the door and covered it with an adjustable vent cover. He cut a circular hole in the lower back wall of the box, and rigged into that hole a dish-dryer motor from an old broken-down dishwasher. The whole thing cost not even a dollar, and you could dry about a half deer’s worth of jerky at a time in there.
If you consider dried meat to be a recipe, then it’s likely the first one that we as humans ever came up with. You can imagine it happening: Some guy long ago was picking shreds of sun-dried meat from a weeks-old lion kill and he got to thinking. The next time he came across a fresh carcass, he hung strips of the meat on bushes and let them dry in the wind and sun. The next day, when he had to move on, he was able to carry the remainder of the meat with him rather than leaving it for the scavengers and maggots. It probably wasn’t too long before we learned that a little salt rubbed into the meat made it even more resistant to bacterial growth during the drying process. Our taste buds conformed to the necessity of salt and began to crave it. Voilà! The American hunter’s favorite treat was born, though it was born far from America.
That you see commercially produced jerky hanging from display racks in gas stations is no accident, at least not in a historic sense. Jerky is, and was, traveling food. In a way, we can thank it for the fact that our ancestors were able to spread out around the globe. As early humans passed into new territories, traveling from island to island and across deserts, they were in constant danger of entering territory where they couldn’t find anything to eat. The best way to mitigate risk would have been to carry food with them, and the best food for that purpose was jerky. It was what you grabbed when you were on the road. Historical accounts are full of anecdotes about war parties of young Native American men headed out to hunt and kill other Native Americans in hostile terrain with nothing besides a few bags of dried meat to sustain them. Some of the most famous Euro-American buffalo hunters—the same men who helped put the Indians out of business by eradicating their food source—rode into new country with nothing for food besides a sack of salt tied to their saddle horn. They were mobile and highly lethal, powered by jerky. There are photos that capture the scene: filthy, scruffy-looking white hide hunters in a camp where the ground is covered in pegged-out buffalo hides and the surrounding trees are hung with strips of jerky like Christmas ornaments. Not only did the meat help them move about without fear of going hungry, but it helped them stay put without fear as well. When hunters were preparing for a long, cold winter in camp, the most important thing to do was put up a generous supply of jerky. In December 1860, a force of Texas Rangers and American cavalry ransacked a Comanche camp that contained more than seven and a half tons of dried meat. At the time, there were only about fifteen people in the camp.
Of course, we don’t eat jerky entirely out of necessity these days. You can kill a deer in October and then eat fresh-tasting meat for the next year thanks to freezers. But the original attributes that made it appealing still apply today. When I was running traplines, I’d cram a Ziploc full of jerky into my coat pocket in the morning. Sometimes, that would be all I’d eat for the entire day. The meat could stay in my pocket for weeks and it would taste pretty much the same no matter what happened to it. If it got wet, I’d set it over the heater vent on my dashboard to dry it back out. If it got dirty, I’d dust it off. After eating a handful, I’d usually have an unchewable wad of connective tissue rolling around in my mouth. Baseball players have mouthfuls of their trademark chewing tobacco; hunters have animal sinew.
Since my trapping days I’ve eaten many forms of jerky. I lived with a Blackfeet guy in Montana during graduate school and his family made jerky the old way, by hanging the meat on lines in the sun and letting it dry naturally. No salt or anything. He’d go home to his reservation over the weekend and come back with a stack of it. Meat like that has a weird sort of metallic taste, at least to me. I hunted with native Hawaiians who season their axis deer jerky in a teriyaki marinade and then dry it in screened boxes outside to keep the bugs off. That was some of the best I’ve eaten. Some of the worst I’ve eaten was collared peccary in Texas, sprinkled with salt and pepper and dried in the hot desert air. It tasted the way collared peccary smell, which isn’t a compliment, though I respected the critter and ate all of it. Another time I spent a couple of weeks hunting with Makushi tribesmen in Guyana and they kept a constant supply of meat drying on racks over a fire. We ate dried black curassow and crestless curassow that we shot out of trees with bows. We ate large dried rodents called paca, which look like chipmunks that are about the size of medium dogs and which taste like superb pork. We ate dried fish, too, ranging from piranhas to peacock bass to electric eels. A few years ago I killed a buffalo with a flintlock muzzle-loader and dried the jerky on a handmade rack next to the Yellowstone River—something that surely happened thousands and thousands of times in the past but that doesn’t happen much anymore.
My favorite way to make jerky is pretty tame by comparison. The finished product isn’t much different from what you might see at your local gas station. First I’ll pull a couple of mule deer shoulders from my freezer. I put them on the kitchen counter until they’re thawed just enough to slice with a very sharp knife. I cut my strips going with the grain, usually an inch or two wide, five or six inches long, and about a quarter-inch thick. I’m not too picky about getting all the fat and sinews trimmed away, because I’m as interested in quantity as I am in quality. I’ve toyed around with many homemade concoctions and spice blends, but it’s really hard to beat the commercially produced jerky seasonings that are sold at sporting goods stores. They come in little boxes with instructions, a bag of seasonings, and a bag of curing salts. Mix up the seasoning and cure, then sprinkle it on the meat according to the recommended dosage and let it set for a day or two. When I’m ready to dry it, I lay it out on squares of quarter-inch hardware cloth cut to fit the racks in my oven. I set the oven at its lowest setting. You want some air flow, so I put an empty beer can against the top of the door and crinkle the door closed against it.
At first the house fills with an odor that smells nothing like the jerky tastes, something like warm blood. My wife hates it, but she agrees that the end product makes it worthwhile. (If that smell gets too strong, your oven is too hot.) Once the odor begins to fade, I start checking the meat every half hour or so. Within a few hours of the start I’ll be pulling the first pieces off. They’re done when they feel as light as jerky. If you need more of an indicator than that, try breaking a piece. It should bend without snapping, and reveal fine little white lines along the fold. After it cools, I put it in gallon-sized Ziplocs. With a few of those bags in my backpack, I can leave home knowing that I’m ready for anything.