About 14,000 people traveled to Marlinton, W.Va., on Saturday for the 35th annual Roadkill Cook-Off, a cooking contest deep in the Appalachian Mountains built on thrift, wild game and a wink at the state’s hillbilly image.
The name overpromises. Contestants need not scrape their ingredients off a highway; the rule is only that dishes feature the sorts of animals commonly struck by cars on rural roads, The Economist reported. Visitors came from as far as Rhode Island and Colorado to Pocahontas County, one of the state’s largest and least populated.
This year’s entries included ground buck with cabbage and braised deer with pancakes and beetroot-cream sauce. In past years cooks have served elk, snakes, snapping turtle and opossum. The judges’ choice this time was a rustic wild-boar stew with apples and rosemary. The most unexpected dish was barbecued bear over macaroni. It came out a little dry, but since the chef said she “found it in a ditch off Route 42,” the judges reckoned it better overcooked than under.
Roadkill cooking grows out of hard arithmetic. West Virginia is the only state entirely within the Appalachian Mountains, all isolated valleys and long drives to a grocery store, and poverty has a long history there. Hunting, drying and pickling define the local table. A few generations ago, people ate what the road provided out of necessity; today it is a choice, and the good ingredients are everywhere for those who know where to look.
The contest also makes a case against waste. Nose-to-tail cooking has become fashionable in big-city restaurants, where bone marrow, liver and sweetbreads no longer raise eyebrows; the term was coined in the mid-1990s by Fergus Henderson, a co-founder of St John, a meat-centered restaurant in London. But as the cook-off shows, rural cooks were using every bit of an animal long before it was chic. When entrails are prepared with care, you’ll want to eat the heart out.
Above all, the festival leans into the stereotype and then undercuts it. The team behind the winning stew calls itself the Coal Hollow Brothers, and its members drank a homemade concoction called Swamp Water from a plastic jug. They are also talented wild-game cooks, and their stew could have sat comfortably on the menu of a city restaurant. Even a haughty gourmet, The Economist’s reviewer concluded, would try it and think: “Give me boar.”