I noticed people talking about rendering fat and it appeared in the couple
of times mentioned that an important point had been missed.  Just in case
anyone who is finding that the rendered fat, or the pemmican you make with
it is unpleasant, listen carefully: here are the instructions for rendering
the fat.

Take the suet and chop it up into smallish pieces.
Throw it into a pot with a SMALL quantity of water (maybe a quarter cup for
every 2-3 pounds of suet).
Run it under a LOW heat until the fat has melted.  You will hear a lot of
crackling as the water boils off; when the crackling stops, it means you've
gotten out all the water and melted your fat pretty good.
**IMPORTANT NEXT STEP**
USE A STRAINER OR SOME CHEESE CLOTH AND RUN THE MELTED STUFF TO IT.  This
filters out the cooked cartilage and veins and other materials that you
don't want in your suet!  You should wind up with a filter full of hard,
crunchy gunk and a pot full of a mostly-clear, brownish liquid.

Allow the brownish liquid to cool and harden, then chop it up, throw in
another tiny little bit of water (about the same as the first time) and
repeat the process again exactly as you did the first time.

The result should be a mostly-clear, light orangish-brown liquid that
hardens into an almost pure white substance.  This you can use as a
flavoring agent in foods, or to cook in (I like to fry with a mixture of
this and pork fat, although it burns easy so you must fry on LOOOOW heat),
or of course to mix with jerky to make pemmican.

Also when making pemmican, I suggest NOT using the food processor to grind
the meat into a fine powder.  I find it much more interesting and tasy if
you have some courseness left to the meat.  That is just personal
preference I'm sure but I like to grind it just long enough so that there's
still a few chunks in it and that the "powder" is more like little threads
an inch or so long (sort of like what you'd get if you took Shredded Wheat
cereal and just crunched it in your hands for a minute or so).  I find this
makes tastier stuff than if I grind it so thoroughly it's literally
"powder."

 -=-=-

Once in a while you get shown the light/
 In the strangest of places if you look at it right   ---Robert Hunter

http://www.syndicomm.com/esmay