Boy oh boy did I ever fall down a rabbit hole yesterday. The Idaho Wild Game Cookbook (shown here) is just one of the many cookbooks, newspaper clippings, and typed or handwritten recipes that my mother stockpiled during her lifetime.
There probably wouldn’t be a high demand here in Southern California the Barbequed Bear recipe below, but I though it was interesting.
Diving into my mom’s old cookbook collection was less of a nostalgic trip down memory lane and more of a high-stakes archaeological dig into a lawless culinary wasteland. Opening those grease-stained, flour-dusted binders is an exercise in pure chaos, where a perfectly reasonable recipe for chocolate chip cookies is immediately followed by a terrifying mid-century monstrosity involving lime Jell-O, canned tuna, and a completely unnecessary amount of mayonnaise. Half the pages of these cookbooks are held together by sheer willpower and decades-old splatters of tomato sauce, while the other half feature cryptic, handwritten scribbles like “Judy’s secret dip—do NOT add the weird salt again” or vague instructions to “bake in a hot oven until it looks right.” You haven’t truly lived until you’ve spent forty-five minutes trying to decipher whether a faded, cursive smudge says “1 tsp arsenic” or “1 tsp allspice,” all the while realizing that your childhood comfort meals were apparently seasoned with nothing but a pinch of hope, a dash of garlic powder, and a total disregard for FDA guidelines.
