Although you will not find a recipe for pemmican in The Joy of Cooking, generations of grade seven history texts, recounting how this Native American food kept the early explorers alive, have made the word pemmican familiar to all Canadians. In contrast, rubbaboo, a stew made by boiling pemmican in water with a little flour, has been all but forgotten, even though it was reputed by the early explorers to be much more palatable than mere pemmican. Like pemmican, the word rubbaboo is Algonquian in origin and first appeared in English in the early nineteenth century.