PINE GROVE, Pa. — The buffet line inside the fire hall in rural Pennsylvania was a familiar sight last weekend as a crowd of about 150 people heaped dinner onto their plates before sitting down to eat, hear a little live music and wait for the raffle.
Aside from a couple of vegetable dishes that were largely ignored, the food being served at the Taste of the Wild Outdoors dinner inside the Pine Grove Hose, Hook and Ladder Fire Company was anything but standard fare.
The menu of 14 species that included stingray casserole, bear stew, raccoon andouille and rabbit kielbasa was the centerpiece of a 12-year-old event organized by Larry Primeau, the volunteer rescue captain and a man with the cooking chops and network of sportsmen friends needed to pull it off.
There was roasted grey squirrel, bobcat lo mein, wild boar ham and coyote teriyaki on a stick. And the mystery meat this year, as a boy in the crowd correctly guessed, was alligator. For the less adventurous, there was also venison and salmon. In previous years, dishes have included wood duck, snapping turtle salami, smoked eel, beaver shepherd’s pie, goose in sauerkraut and groundhog chili and chorizo.
Jim Jasterzenski braved the slushy weather and traveled about 74 miles (119 kilometers) from his home in Kingston. He rated the bobcat as very tender.
“Everything was good,” said Jasterzenski, whose companion at one point plucked a tiny shotgun pellet out of a serving of squirrel. “You can’t get it anywhere else.”
The raccoon andouille sausage, served with cheddar mini pierogies, won over Sue Demko, Jasterzenski’s wife.
“I normally don’t like rabbit,” Demko said. “But it’s just, I don’t know — it’s just good.”
The bear stew “tastes like beef,” said Jack Gentilesco of Mountaintop, Pennsylvania. “Very much like beef.”
Primeau’s goals are to encourage anglers, hunters and trappers to consider new species as food, make full use of the animals they kill and raise money for youth outdoor activities.
“In my opinion, any time we can get a kid away from a computer, away from a cellphone and out fishing, hunting — anything in the outdoors — that’s a great thing,” Primeau said.
For predators like fox and coyote, smoking helps conceal their musky natural flavor. Coyote has been popular as a smoked ham. A previous year’s venison boudin sausage divided diners, Primeau said: “Half the crowd loved it and half the crowd hated it.”
All of the game on the menu Saturday was legally harvested somewhere in the United States, much of it in Pennsylvania.
It is generally prohibited to sell wild game meat in Pennsylvania, a law that Primeau and his crew of relatives and friends comply with by packaging the event as a night of family entertainment and fundraiser. Schuylkill County Wild Outdoors is a registered charity. Primeau’s hunting and fishing friends supply the major attraction, a plateful of the kind of meat that money can’t buy.
Dave Mease Jr. donated the bobcat, coyote, stingray and salmon and brought along family members to enjoy it.
“The cool thing is you get to try things you’d never get to eat,” Mease said, recalling the crow that was the prior year’s mystery meat. “It was actually really good.”
From Primeau’s boyhood outside Pine Grove, he has a fond memory of his grandmother’s Shake ‘N Bake squirrel and getting a taste of more exotic game, antelope, as a Boy Scout. By his teen years, he had developed an avid interest in survivalism. These days, when he is not working in his construction business, he might be foraging for edible wild plants, fishing or making an annual trek to a spot in South Carolina where spends a week hunting wild boar.
“I like variety,” Primeau said as he oversaw hours of cooking. “Variety — the spice of life.”
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