Who grilled Bambi? Everything’s fair game at Roadkill Cook-Off including fried bear and snake over rice

The rules are simple.

Prepare a meal featuring an animal normally found dead on the side of a highway. For example: snake, armadillo, groundhog, possum or squirrel.

Your dish has to be at least a quarter meat.

It should be hunted or farmed — flecks of roadside gravel would be disqualifying — and it must be cooked on-site.

Six teams are competing in the 33rd annual Roadkill Cook-Off. There were going to be seven, but the crew planning to cook groundhog dropped out.

On the last weekend in September, vendors line the streets, selling everything from turkey calls and Mothman T-shirts to hatchets and pepperoni rolls.

A barbecue stand by the river sells gator and rice, smoked frog legs and buffalo and boar sausage.

Third-party gubernatorial candidates hawk small-town values, making vague claims about “bringing West Virginia back to West Virginia.”

Townspeople square-dance, with a 95-year-old man calling out the moves, and crown a 20-year-old nursing student as festival queen.

But the heart of the event is the culinary competition. The bizarre foods. The roadkill. One year, the cook-off drew 20,000 people to this town of 1000.

The Roadkill Cook-Off is Marlinton’s Coachella. It’s Mardi Gras or Super Bowl. And Marlinton tries to have its snake and eat it, too, by leaning into West Virginia’s stereotypes while trying to show there’s something more to the state than hillbilly caricature.

You can walk the length of Marlinton in about 14 minutes.

Tucked in the Allegheny Mountains along the Greenbrier River, the town occasionally pops up on the national radar, usually for the Roadkill Cook-Off, though it sparked some interest in June when alt-country superstar Zach Bryan chose the Old Mountain Tavern, the town’s only bar, to hold an early listening party for his latest album, The Great American Bar Scene.

There’s no UberEats or DoorDash here, no chain hotels or fast-food joints.

Most people chat on Facebook Messenger because cell service is so spotty. If they’re not drinking Busch Light on their porches, folks gather at the Old Mountain Tavern or Dari-Land, a coffee and ice cream shop decorated with a stuffed fox.

You can reach Marlinton only by country roads, and the barflies hanging out on the tavern’s deck occasionally belt out John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” without a trace of irony.

“I got so drunk the night before last year,” brags a woman sitting on the deck after Friday’s square dance. She seems to have repeated the performance, as she cannot quite remember her name.

For all the oddities, the residents of Marlinton are clear-eyed and full-throated about the purpose of the cook-off: revenue for a small mountain town whose primary industry is tourism.

“The Rotary Club, the Lions Club, the Shriners Club - this is how they raise money,” says Kendall Beverage, whose team, the PCB Buck Busters, cooked a deer-and-bean dish. “This fundraiser funds our schools, our sports teams, all year round.”

Years ago, there was a sense that the shindig cast West Virginians in a bad light by leaning too far into stereotypes of “roadkill and hillbillies and stuff,” says Marlinton native Joshua Barkley, who wears a fox pelt hat, pioneer fringe jacket and a bowie knife hanging on one hip and a flintlock pistol on the other.

“But,” he says, “this is just who we are.”

The cook-off teams start serving 7000 festival-goers by late morning in a small park, while a group of fiddlers play Appalachian tunes in a gazebo.

A wristband coloured hunting-vest orange affords you tasting cups of all six dishes and a people’s choice ballot to cast your vote. At least one team offers a shot of moonshine in exchange for a vote. The recipe for the dish is displayed at each station, as is a warning: “Eat at your own risk! Food is not inspected by the health department.”

A cast-iron stomach is recommended though not required.

The Croakin’ Deer Stew mixes frog (caught that morning) and venison in a spicy étouffée.

The Bambi Bumper Wrap tucks ground venison into a burrito and comes with a “deep-fried Bambi tail,” which is a battered and fried marshmallow.

One team, the High Rocks Grow Getters, is led by a man who cooked at the first three festivals before declaring his retirement. He returned this year, though, and through some secret alchemy, transforms tough deer meat into something as tender as rib-eye for “Front Fender Farm Stand Stir Fry.”

Their secret? They say they tenderised it with a car’s front bumper. (This is a joke; jokes are a key ingredient here.)

More adventurous eaters might try the fried bear dished out by Kayla Kuh.

You get about 22kg of meat off a black bear. Kuh’s team fried it on a flat-top grill with red peppers, basil and eggs.

“A West Virginia omelette,” Kuh says.

The cook-off, inspired by “Road Kill Cooking” by Jeff Eberbaugh, began in 1991 as a small, local fundraiser. The general attitude at the time, says co-creator Cara Rose, was simply, “What the heck? Let’s do it.”

Merrily Taylor, who now slings kettle corn, had her own what the heck moment at that inaugural festival. She was visiting the now-deceased Terry Richardson’s hardware store on Main Street. He offered her the two rattlesnakes in his freezer that he’d gotten from a customer as a means of settling a bill.

What the heck. She entered the contest with rattlesnake and chicken over rice, with a reduced cider and cream sauce.

“It was simpler back then,” Taylor says. That was before celebrity chef Andrew Zimmern featured the cook-off on his Food Network show Bizarre Foods America in 2012, prompting record crowds.

“Now,” says Taylor, “You have to cook for 1000 people.”

She worries about tourism changing the character of the town, even though the town relies on it. Visitors once trickled in to walk the Greenbrier River Trail, or find cheaper lodging for skiing at nearby Snowshoe Mountain. Now, they swarm Marlinton to eat strange meats.

It’s a balancing act, says Joffrey Woods, who co-runs the Old Clark Inn. He bemoans the empty store fronts along the town’s main stretch.

“We don’t want corporations coming in,” Woods says. “But it’d be nice if we could get a few more restaurants.”

“West Virginia is a step shy of a cult,” says Alex Burdette, who works as a glass blower and served as a Roadkill Cook-Off judge. “We get a lot of s... nationally.”

He wears novelty sunglasses with heart-shaped rims. A small statuette of a dining room table dangles from his right lobe as an earring. He doesn’t fit the stereotype of a typical West Virginian, and it’s true that growing up, he hated living here.

But now he uses a tattooed outline of the state on his forearm as a map to excitedly point out the best salt mines, the best places for BASE jumping and the villages with the best sand for making glass.

Sceptics still think of West Virginians as shoeless, backwater hillbillies, he says, but he defends the state’s strange stew of hollers - stringy with weirdness and hearty with pride.

“I think of West Virginia as a megacity, as a New York or L.,” says Mr Burdette.

“But instead of taking an hour to go to a neighbourhood that’s only a few miles away, you get an hour and you’re in a different city a hundred miles away. Fayetteville’s a surf town in the middle of the mountains. Charleston’s a government town. Huntington’s your arts town. This is one of those small little mountain towns, where you go to catch a breath.”

And where you also go to watch a team dressed as the rat from the Disney movie “Ratatouille” win the showmanship award by serving “Road to Table Venison Ratatouille sur du Fresh Rat Droppings,” an Appalachian take on the French peasant dish. Their station is decorated with a plastic rat that has a trail of small grains of black rice blooming from its back end.

The High Rocks Grow Getters take home the gold for their Front Fender Farm Stand Stir Fry.

The team grew all the produce: two bushels of green and red peppers, a bushel of onions. The three deer in the stir-fry lived on their property.

No, none of it was actual roadkill. The symbolism was literal enough.

“A lot of these people’s grandparents and great-grandparents,” says cook-off judge Jim Adkins, “actually ate roadkill.”