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Feature article
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Game on the grill steals Superbowl show
By Fred Sauceman
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| Mike Strickler of Falls Church, Virginia, barbecues bear in the backyard of his friend Buster Miller in Johnson City. (Fred Sauceman photo) |
There were no chicken wings for us this year on Super Bowl Sunday. No pizza. None of those rings of shrimp. No cocktail wieners or Crock Pot meatballs. Harold “Buster” Miller asked us to join his “wild game” party.
“There’ll be a lot of testosterone there, but you’re welcome to bring your wife,” Buster said.
His promise to barbecue bear convinced me. Up until last Sunday, there had been a void in my food life. Even though I started hearing Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone tall tales at an early age, and even though my first cousin is a bear hunter in southern Greene County, the first 51½ years of my life passed before I ever tasted bear.
Every Super Bowl Sunday, Buster herds in his Johnson City friends and guys he grew up with in Falls Church, Virginia, for a feast of game.
Buster, a diversified technology teacher at South Greene High School, built his own barbecue cooker out of a 36-inch stainless steel drum cut in half,
His childhood next-door neighbor, Mike Strickler of Falls Church, tends the hickory and cherry wood fire, keeping the temperature around 300 degrees as a bear hindquarter, two tenderloins, and a deer leg absorb the smoke.
“The bear’s actually done,” Mike says, not long after he places it in the cooker. “We’re flavoring it and getting rid of the rest of the grease.
“First you parboil the bear twice. You boil it, throw away the water, and boil it again.”
Outside, Mike struggles to get the cooking temperature back up as an unexpected rain blows in. A line of beer drinkers, reminding me of a scene from the Fox television program “King of the Hill,” relocates to the living room.
The bear was shot in the North Carolina mountains by one of Buster’s students from South Greene.
“Bear, I equate with duck,” Mike says. “It tastes like the dark meat of a duck to me. It’s juicy, a little oily. The tenderloins have been punched with garlic, but the leg is just smoked.”
Buster likens it to a “good, flavorful piece of roast beef,” and he boils down a stockpot full of potatoes to go with the bear.
As the party gets started, cubes of alligator meat are deep-fried. Quail is on the menu, and rabbit. Buster flours the rabbit and browns it with onions and mushrooms in a black iron skillet. I look at the leavings in the skillet and think rabbit gravy.
Although the Super Bowl is close throughout and the New York Giants don’t prevail until the final seconds, guests’ attention is split between the game on the field and the game on the stove.
Bill Howard, a meat cutter for 36 years in Fredericksburg, Virginia, deftly carves the bear. The meat never makes it to the table, as a kitchen counter raid takes place.
Says Mike, “We just slice it up and put it on a platter for people to stab.”
I forego bread, turn down sauce, and eat the meat just as it is, unseasoned.
“Some people have Christmas parties and parties for all kinds of reasons, but I have the Super Bowl,” Buster says, “just to get together and cook.”
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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