(07-11) 04:00 PDT Billings, Mont. -- Success, which spoils things, has most surely changed the time-honored menu of the great Testicle Festival.
"It's not the same anymore,'' moped Bob Zeier, a 75-year-old retired cattle rancher, sitting in the Ryegate Bar and Cafe and dragging on a Camel filter. "Not the same at all. A bull testicle is just not the same as a calf testicle.''
Ryegate, a small town about 60 miles northwest of Billings, is the sort of place a motorist is not obliged to stop at but a cross-country bicyclist is, because among the bar's less-popular beverages is tap water. Downtown Ryegate, population 250, is a block long, give or take a block.
For 22 years, the town has hosted the Ryegate Testicle Festival each June to celebrate the fabled Rocky Mountain oyster, considered either a delicacy in these parts or something to sell to disbelieving tourists at $4.50 a plate. It's what's left over after a bull or a calf has gone in for life-altering surgery.
In the 1980s, the festival was a homey affair. Everyone in town brought a potluck dish to the cafe and the nearby park to share, and the testicles were those freshly removed from young calves on nearby cattle ranches.
"A fresh calf testicle tastes like lobster,'' said Zeier. "You never had anything like it.''
Word of the annual celebration and free meal got around. Pretty soon, folks started showing up from out of town.
"You'd get freeloaders from Billings, just coming in for the meal and a laugh and going home without buying anything,'' said bartender and cook Phil Fisher. "We had to do something about it.''
Thane Russell, who took over ownership of the bar in the 1990s, decided the thing to do would be to start charging $7 for the meal, like they do at the five other testicle festivals in Montana -- testicle festivals being something of a going concern on the high range. But if you charge for the meal, you have to serve federally inspected beef, and fresh local calf testicles don't qualify.
Russell, who did not want the wrath of USDA inspectors descending on his festival, was obliged to switch to frozen, commercially available bull testicles from out of the area.
"Bull nuts taste like shoe leather,'' said Zeier. "You can have 'em.''
It was 8:45 a.m. the other morning at the bar, a perfect time in Montana to ease into a lager and get a head start on the 102-degree day to come. Zeier, who figures he has personally castrated thousands of cattle in his long career, stubbed out one Camel and lit another.
In Montana, smoking in bars is still legal, along with nearly everything else.
"The difference between eating calf nuts and bull nuts is the difference between eating a spring fryer and a stewing hen,'' Zeier said. "Try it, you'll see.''
Fisher keeps a supply of frozen bull testicles on hand, to fry up for customers who drop by after the festival is over. They look like chicken nuggets but they do not taste like chicken nuggets. A deep-fried frozen bull testicle tastes like the Brooks leather bike saddle this reporter has been straddling for two weeks on a Seattle-to-Washington, D.C., ride for charity with 39 other cyclists.
"Told you so,'' said Zeier.
Russell, like most Montana folks, has an abiding appreciation for every last little part of the bovine animal. There is nothing odd about the Rocky Mountain oyster. Beef, it's what's for dinner.
"Why not eat 'em?' he said. "There's no reason not to. Why throw 'em away? They're part of the animal. That's just how it is.''
Discussion Zen 5 Speculation (EPYC Turin and Strix Point/Granite Ridge - Ryzen 9000)
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