Safer to get the meat up to 145 to 150 degrees, which is medium-still pink, by the way. To kill trichinae parasites you need to hit at least 135 degrees and hold it there for a long time, at least an hour. No one gets trichinosis from domestic hogs anymore, but they sure do from wild boar, bear and, oddly, walrus. What to do with this meat? In the kitchen, the most important thing you need to know about bear is that it is the single biggest vector for trichinosis in North America. Cork must have dressed and cared for the meat very well. Everything I'd heard about bear was that it was smelly.
I put my nose up to the meat and inhaled. Closest match would be the darkest part of a high-quality pork shoulder. Very red, but far lighter than venison and darker than most pork. My first impression is that bear looks like lamb. But my colleague Cork Graham did shoot a bear last week, and was kind enough to offer me some bear stew meat and a half-pound bear flat roast the roast has a meat grain like a brisket, only much smaller. Sadly, life intervened and I never did get around to it. I decided then to buy a bear tag and hunt one for the first time. No one shoots a 150-pound bear (normal for California) for the rug it's too small. Holly, who is more active in hunting politics than I am, started asking every bear hunter she could find if they did in fact eat the bears they shot.
All I heard during the debate was "trophy bear" this and "trophy bear" that. This fact alone has thus far stopped me from buying a bear tag.Īll of this stuff swirled through my head earlier this year when California went through a round-and-round over whether to expand the number of counties where we can hunt bear. Eat a bear that had gorged on salmon and it'll taste like low tide on a hot day. Eat a bear that had been dining on berries and manzanita and you are in for a feast.
Of all the things humans eat with any regularity, bears come closest to being us.įinally, there is the practical consideration reported by most modern bear hunters that bear meat is insanely variable. The American Indians put bears in a different spiritual place in part for this reason. Then there is the biological fact that bears a) are omnivores like us, and b) look disturbingly like people when skinned. It's worth noting that the only land animal that routinely hunts and eats humans isn't the lion, or the alligator, or the tiger: It's the polar bear. Bears manage to be cute and cruel all at once-most of us balance, uneasily, the mental image of the fuzzy, huggy bear of childhood with the knowledge that at least some bears will happily tear you apart and eat you alive if given the chance.
Steve Hillebrand/US Fish & Wildlife Serviceīut something else is at work here, a cloudy notion that bears are somehow different from deer or ducks or upland birds. When I've seen them, which is rare, bear have been an ink spot looking at me from a distant meadow, or a fading crash through the underbrush as the beast ran from my approach. My personal experiences with black bears have been fleeting, and mostly annoying They routinely pillaged my father's garbage when he lived in the Watchung Hills of New Jersey. So why have I (and, I daresay, many of you) always felt ambivalent about eating bears? Was it watching Grizzly Adams as a kid? Winnie the Pooh? Maybe it was because I clutched a teddy bear every night when I was tucked into bed as a toddler. Gourmet magazine never catered to the redneck hunter crowd: Putting bear in their cookbook means it was a legitimate facet of haute cuisine.
#BEAR RUG NATIVE GAME HOW TO#
One of the best-selling cookbooks of all time, Meta Given's Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking (first written in 1947) includes a section on bear with helpful butchering tips, such as how to remove the scent glands behind the animal's hind legs.Įven more telling is that the 1957 edition of the Gourmet Cookbook includes three recipes for bear. Very red, but far lighter than venison and darker than pork.īear regularly made its way to market before the sale of wild game was outlawed in the early 1900s, and it retained a place in the American palate right through the late 1950s.
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