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The Testicle Cannon
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Literary Nonfiction by Max Kenkel
In order to appreciate the end, we should start at the beginning - at least 9,000 years before Christ.
This is how far back scientists have found evidence for castration in animals.(1)
Hearing, reading, and learning about castration is kind of wild in its own right. Here, let me rip out your balls, creature. It's especially weird to hear about it now because it's been phased out of so many aspects of our daily lives. Pretty much the only mainstream medium referencing it with any regularity these days is set in fictional Westeros or mentioned in a Saves The Day song, unless you are in the livestock business. This wasn't always the case. Regardless, one can't truly appreciate the artform until you have been there. Until you have witnessed it in person. Until you've made the cut and held a freshly removed, still-beating testicle in your bare hands.
I am just kidding. They don’t beat. But like, imagine the person who only read the open and then never finished this essay and they start a rumor that testicles beat.
For both of our enjoyment, try pronouncing it like Hercules the rest of the essay - Test-ah-clees.
Historically, there are several benefits to gelding animals. There are behavioral benefits - creating more docile critters for domestication. Male livestock like bulls, boars and stallions will fight to the death if you don’t cut them. Cats and dogs get neutered routinely to limit the speed with which they would propagate the globe. And most importantly, in pigs, it eliminates “boar taint,” or what I would call “brothel pork chops”.(2)
If you don't castrate male pigs, they will produce two main chemicals in abundance. Androstenone will (at best) make the meat taste like piss. Skatole will make it taste like shit. Both are stored in the fat. And if the pig nuts, it turns these chemicals up to eleven, and then when you cook sausage it'll taste and smell like a hog confinement building in the kitchen and pork chops will smell like a Saturday morning bordello and taste like a wild animal’s bachelor party. Yick. It's best to castrate pigs early - two to four weeks old.
Boar Taint is a funny enough topic for its own separate essay. It’s so funny to me (and a few friends) that we came up with a fake brand called Tasty Boar. I even wrote a couple of jingles for it and created a logo. Tasty Boar has nature’s spice. Tasty Boar IS nature’s spice.
Here are the (fake) ads I wrote for Tasty Boar Meats:
TASTY BOAR MEATS AD #1
What do you get when you want the taste?
Tasty Boar!
What are you eating when you make that face?
Tasty Boar!
We've got spiceless sausage and locker room loaf
Uncured ham and ground balls (both!)
What do you get for that special day?
It's Tasty Boar!
Tasty Boar: Taste what you smell!
Disclaimer: Tasty Boar may cause violent vomiting. Call a physician immediately if vomiting continues for more than six hours.
TASTY BOAR MEATS AD #2
When you want something with more flavor than rice!
When you want to eat something that you'll never eat twice!
It's Tasty Boar!
It's made of hocks and jowls and even the squeal!
It'll bounce like rubber and it's hard as steel!
Grind it all up without any spice!
Your guests will say "No thanks, not tonight!"
It's Tasty Boar!
So when you get a hunger and you need to devour!
And you don't really mind a bad case of the scours!
It's Tayyyyyyyaaaaaaasty Boar!
Tasty Boar: Taste What You Smell!
(Disclaimer) Contains some wood.
TASTY BOAR MEATS AD #3
When you want something that contains some wood
And you want that protein to do a body good
And you don't mind boar and you dislike spice
Then Tasty Boar has something to entice
With our extra-cured Boar and pine tree links
You'll open the package and say "JESUS CHRIST, THIS STINKS!"
Just cook on high for an hour or so
Till the fat loosens up and the juices really flow
Put down that inferior store brand generic
And try the sausage that'll make you say
"Did I just eat an actual boar’s dick?"
TASTY BOAR AD #4
I know a treat (it’s Tasty Boar!)
It always smells like feet (it’s Tasty Boar!)
It comes in logs of three (it’s Tasty Boar!)
We love it, you know it's true (it’s Tasty Boar!)
(Key change into driving rock song)
Our boars are all locked up
Living in a cage
Facing one direction
Never given space
We only ever feed them
Wood and mayonnaise
That way all our meat
Comes out looking gray
Just one bite and
You'll taste it for three days
Our sausage isn't cured
It sets out in the sun
There is no recipe
We just smell when it's done
Pick some up today
At your local store
Forget all of this ad
But not the Tasty Boar!
Disclaimer: Some customers report the need to boil vinegar after preparation. Cook at your own risk.
And here’s the absurd logo I made for it:
Okay, enough of that nonsense. You get the point. If you’ve ever cooked a sausage link and it smells like when you drive by a hog house out on the highway on a 90-degree day, then you’ve had boar tainted meat. It ain’t great, but it does lend itself well to song. And if you’re playing at home, cooking fish or bacon or boar tainted meat can stink up the crib, and if you put a small pan with about an inch of vinegar on the stove and simmer, it will help to remove the smell from your house. And if you have a party in your parents' house and it smells in the morning like smoke or beer or booze or weed or worse, then make a couple pounds of bacon for breakfast. Problem solved!
The process of castration is simple, and for this story we aren't going to debate the methods or humaneness(3) of doing a little bathroom surgery in the farrowing house. Even in just the last ten years there are less invasive and improved, slightly more cost-effective ways than say 30 years ago, often chemically, to accomplish the same end(4), although it’s probably not cost-effective at scale. Broadly speaking, most farms still do their castratin’ the old fashioned way.
With brute force.
For horses and calves, castration is usually done with the critter standing up, although in my research you can apparently put a horse in a recumbent position(5). I think if you are going to go through that trouble, you may as well give the poor horsey a heater and an old fashioned, too. Do yourself a favor, and DO NOT look up pictures of horses being castrated in a sitting position. You will be just fine if you never look that up.
You looked it up, didn’t you? Dude, I told you not to look it up.
If, God forbid, they (cattle or horses) are too old to cut, the vet or the farmer may band them. Actually, they will even band young ones. It's less invasive than scalpel. Banding is like a rubber band(6) super tight that they put over the scrotum with a little device special-made for the job, and then eventually the balls just go black and fall off. They probably go blue first, and that’s kind of funny. Not as funny as the statue of Albert the Bull in Audubon, Iowa. Every once in a while someone will paint his bull balls blue, and I’m sure that makes 40% of the townsfolk chuckle and makes 40% start a holy war and makes 20% wonder why they didn’t think of it first. But yeah, banding is certainly a way to remove a big old pair, and what a way to go!
One time I tweaked something in my lower back, and for about two months I felt like something or someone had a steady grip on my boys. Very uncomfortable. That entire time, I constantly thought to myself, “This must be what banded livestock feels like”. It sucked. Do not want. Luckily for me, it eventually went away when I got my bones and nerves back into place. Not so lucky for the banded, bellowing barnyard studs.
Pigs aren't banded because of how they are built. Quick anatomy visual: while cattle, horses, goats, and others have their boys hanging down between their legs like a giant pendulum, male pigs have their balls higher up behind their legs, just under their butthole. Like, so close to their exit that I'm convinced the phrase "holy shit balls!" is derived from someone looking over at a boar while he was taking a dump, seeing it land directly on his berries, and making a declaration that would live on forever.
For pigs, since they are typically so young when castrated, most people would probably have one person hold the pig by the back legs and the other would use a scalpel to make the incision and pop their little nuts out. Alternatively, they might use a “pig castration rack”. I even found a video on YouTube to make your own DIY “Pig Jig”(7). That makes it sound like a 4H crafting project, and that makes it sound way more fun than it is. But if you are my dad and brother, because they have monster hands like a big old Easter ham with bananas coming out of it, they just hold the pig in their left and cut with their right.
To perform, you kind of squeeze the legs together to get the balls to fill up the scrotum. Using the scalpel, the castrator makes a ½ to 1 inch long incision across the bottom half of the nut sack until the testicle is exposed. Calling someone the castrator made me think it should be like in a king’s court. “The Royal Castrator”. I intentionally didn’t talk about the process of creating eunuchs, though, in this essay. For more on that, I recommend watching or reading “Game of Thrones,” or reading “A Brief History of Castration” by Victor Cheney. Or watching the scene in "Pulp Fiction" with Marcellus and Zed. "A Brief History..." is an extremely detailed and aggressively thorough look into the practice of human castration throughout ancient Mesopotamia, Rome, China, and beyond. It’s not for the squeamish or faint of heart.
Do you remember the “boop, got your nose” game? Quickly, with a similar movement, squeeze each nut between your index and middle finger and thumb and firmly pull on the ball until it is totally removed. Boop. The ball is just part of it. There's all manner of stringy bits attached that need to come out, too. Usually it'll all come out together but sometimes, once both nuts are removed, you gotta use the tail clipper like a pliers to fish an end and pull any remnants out. You don't want to leave a bunch of stringy things hanging out of the incision. Then, if the piglet is lucky, the bathroom surgeon will spray an antiseptic. If they are extra lucky they will get a little numbing action in the spray. If they are unlucky, they might get nothing. Whilst a low age in the pig makes the procedure way easier, almost always bloodless, and a relatively quick recovery, it does not make it painless. There was a study done where the researchers castrated pigs at various weeks and measured their squeal volume and duration. No matter the age, the study(3) found that it hurt about the same.
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Photo Credit Above: Iz (Calf Balls) and Satan (Biggest Boar)
Yeah, no shit it hurt the same. I could have told them that. There’s no “good age” to get your balls ripped out of your body while you are awake and without any kind of numbing whatsoever. That’s why there are groups in Europe and elsewhere pushing hard to change the way pigs are worked, especially in Europe. Despite this push, about ¾ of all pigs castrated are castrated by hand, as previously described.
It's frontier medicine in all its glory, and it's as much a part of a hog farmer's life in the way a lawyer might look up a case or a cashier adds quarters to the till.
I used to help dad every time. I'd be in the crate catching piglets and I'd hand the pig to dad. First, I was a pig catcher, then I graduated to vaccination shots and clipping the tail. Dad would castrate. Later, dad tried to make me do it all. That lasted less than one full session. We had 34 crates, so about 340 to 400 pigs to work each time.
I could do the other components of swine care just fine. I was excellent at giving shots, usually one cc of iron at birth, and some sort of a vaccine and scour shield as they got older. Scour is a fancy way of saying “the shits”. “Shield” was to prevent the pigs getting rampant “the shits”. These specific scours were yellowish, meaning we needed to give them additional medicine. Usually the scour shield worked pretty well as a preventative. We ran a mostly outdoor, regularly cleaned operation. By ensuring plenty of fresh air and plenty of fresh bedding, we kept illness and disease to a minimum, but sometimes they would just pick something up and we’d take the appropriate steps for extra care to ensure the health of the herd.
I could clip teeth and cut tails. We would clip their teeth within 24 hours of birth because a piglet’s little teeth are like razors on a sow's teats and clipping the teeth both prevented mastitis (an infection in the sow's udders) and biting as the pigs grew into fat hog status. I was very gentle when I did this to be very careful that I didn’t accidentally nick their gums or their tongue. The best way I found was to hold the pig in my left hand and the clippers in my right. Think like the small wire clippers (sometimes called side cutters) you can get in the dollar bin at the hardware store. With my middle finger I would open their jaw and get my finger back in the crease of their mouth. Those little devils had SHARP teeth so it was important to not get bit if possible. I still have scars. Then, I would start on the left side clipping top and bottom. I honestly don’t think this hurt them because they never really made any noise. I think doing it really young was important. After I finished the left side I would rotate my arm so that the pig was laying on my forearm and then I would use my thumb around their head to peel back their lip on the right side and make my two clips. It took me twice as long to type that out than it did to actually complete the clipping. It was a quick, generally painless procedure that protected them later on. Then I would give them two pumps of the scour shield down their throat. It was like a little pump bottle with a four-inch straw on it that would slide down their throat part way to ensure most of the medicine made it into their system. One time I had some of it on my hand and didn’t realize it when I went to wipe sweat away on my nose and I got some of it on my lip. It didn’t really taste but it was sweet, so I don’t think they minded it too much. Think corn syrup, both in texture and taste.
We would clip tails as the last part of castration on males and after doing shots on females so we could track the ones we've done. This also prevented the pigs from chewing on each other as they grew into bacon..
Fat hog is an industry term. And, technically, a commodity.
For posterity, here’s what you call a hog at different times:
- Boar: Male pig, with his nuts (scientifically referred to as “intact”), typically used as breeding stock; masochistically used as food
- Sow: Female pig who has had at least one litter
- Gilt: A female pig that has not produced a litter. Breeding or butchering. Doesn’t matter.
- Barrow: A castrated male pig for butchering.
- Piglet: Term for a pig that is born, but hasn’t been weaned yet.
- Weaner pig: A pig that is currently weaned from the sow. We’d do this about 4-6 weeks after birth. Weaning means we take them away from the sow and they live out their lives with the rest of their age group before they are sold for meat. (I have never used this term in my life)
- Suckling pig: These are piglets that are still nursing but are culled early in order to provide one whole small meal, typically for special occasions. I don’t know anyone who ever did this in all of my years on the farm. (I used this term once when giving a friend a hard time about his mom)
- Roaster Pig: Whole hog for events, either cooked on a spit or in a pit. I saw this in practice a couple times. Usually was pretty good. You can see this first hand at a lot of BBQ joints where they smoke a whole hog. (I also used this to give the same friend a hard time about his mom) If you are ever in Nashville and come in the back door of the downtown Martin's BBQ, you'll walk right past their pits and if you time it right, the pit master will be there doing his thing, and if you ask he might explain it all to you.
- Feeder Pig: A non-breeding stock hog on his or her way to getting fat for butchering.
- Fat Hog: A fat hog ready for slaughter. Usually somewhere between 225 and 300 pounds.
- Shoat: A pig that either weighs under 120 pounds or is under a year old. I saw a lot of different definitions but they pretty much all mean a younger pig. (you should use this to talk about your friends’ moms, I bet they will love it).
- Gelding: This is the name for a worked horse.
- Stallion: An intact male horse.
- Colt: A newborn horse.
- Mare: A female horse roughly three years and older.
- Filly: A female horse under three years old.
- Bull: An intact male cow.
- Calf: A newborn to about a year old cow.
- Yearling: About a year-old calf.
- Steer: This is the name for a worked cow.
- Heifer: This is a female cow that hasn’t given birth.
- Cow: This is a cow that gave birth, and also just a generic term for them. Cows are like Coke in the south. "I'm going to go check the cows. No, not the cows, the steers. Well, all steers is cows. Not all cows is steers."
- Cattle: An even better generic term for any bovine, but it sounds weird to say "Steer: a cattle" so I just said above what I said and figure most people are too stupid to know any better and anyone who does know will either just understand my choice or try to give me a hard time and I can live with both of those outcomes.
- Eunuch: This is a human that has been worked. Also in old literature referred to as a “castrati.”
- One more definition: We called the process of shots, castration and clipping tails “working pigs”. That's how I'll refer to it from here on out. And above because I've already referred to it that way.
Oh yeah, I mentioned the clipping of tails. If you didn’t clip a tail, that was an enticer for other pigs to chew on, especially if the feeder pig would happen to get it caught somewhere and it started bleeding. I saw more than once a pig get some sort of injury on or near their tail and the other pigs literally ate its whole ass overnight. Like it was missing a significant amount of its anatomy and had to be raised in a separate pen, or in one case, put down to end its suffering. Once pigs got the taste, man, they were relentless. So clipping tails early was a good practice, in my opinion. It beat the alternative, for sure. I know why in that one Hannibal Lector movie they threw the body into the pigpen. Santa Maria!
Sometimes the sow would have trouble birthing. On more than one occasion I soaped up my arm and pulled pigs. That's where the sow has trouble giving birth so someone has to go in with a hand and get them out. And it can’t be dad. Not with that five-gallon-bucket fist. No way that thing is fitting. No, it’s gotta be a kid or a guy with tiny hands. You don't know the miracle of birth until you ARE the miracle of birth, going shoulder-deep in a sow's vagina and canal fishing around for little baby pigs as a ten year old for $2 a pop. Empirically, I've done and seen some disgusting, wild shit and could handle it just fine. Top all of this off by the fact that I was the de facto farm undertaker for about a decade (a story for another time). I’ve smelled the worst smells the farm had to offer, and seen some of the most disgusting shit that would make a billy goat puke (yes, that’s a Rambo reference).
But I just couldn't bring myself to castrate.
I think this pissed my dad off tremendously, but by his big ass hands was the only way those pigs were getting worked until my brother Sam, who was five years younger, could do it. Then I'd help Sam. We argued and fought a lot growing up but we actually worked pretty well together so we'd joke around and have fun. Sam loves animals and he was as gentle as anyone could be when ripping the balls out of his squealing little patients.
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Here's where our story about testicles reaches a climax, so let’s start to stitch this Frankenstory together.
Up until the point where you have completely removed the testicle, at least in our operation, my dad and Sam were swift, efficient, careful, and as respectful as you can be when you are ripping someone's balls out en masse and with force.
However, at the point it's done and the squealing stops, that critter patient doesn’t care what you do with it, but you gotta put the nut somewhere. Usually it just ended up on the floor behind the crate or kicked into the manure pit where it would dissolve pretty quickly. I suppose a real sicko could try to keep them and eat them. That’s definitely something that has happened, although usually with calf balls or what are often called Rocky Mountain Oysters. I would not recommend putting them in a Christmas stew.
This alley behind the crates was also where any unfortunate piglet souls who lost their life due to being stillborn or laid on by the sow would momentarily take up residence while I loaded them up in the skid loader bucket and ferried them across the River Stinx (ha ha) to be buried (this is and was legal for little animals) or put on the dead wagon if we had a bigger one that needed to go (read: had died). More on that in a different essay. (That's called a teaser for one of the next pieces I'm writing.)
But while we're on the topic, death is a part of life for livestock farmers, and any good farmer does what they can to limit, or outright eliminate death loss. I will reiterate here that this was all happening 30 years ago and it was a different time and place. Also, please note, if you ever step on a freshly removed testicle, you will know why they call it a nut. The only way I could get a similar sound would be to walk on walnut shells, or possibly acorns on concrete.
At this point I don't remember who started it. I assume it was me because I did a lot of dumb things. The farrowing house building had giant fans mounted into the east wall to circulate the air, and one of us (probably me) decided to pick up a discarded testicle off of the floor and, in one swift motion, fire that pig nut like Jonathon Moxon right into the industrial fan, currently operating at a very high rate of speed. Talk about Varsity ‘Blew’!
It. Was. Like. Magic.
It made a series of thunks and then shot out into space (in this case, the lawn on the east side of the building). I ran outside to see where it landed, and somehow throwing a testicle at a high rate of speed into the fan resulted in it picking up speed on the way out. It was like a gun. We made a testicle gun. A testicle cannon (see fan picture above).
At that point, we had to hustle back down the surgical route littered with discarded testicles we had removed for the last hour and pick up the balls and throw them through the fan to hear them bang around and then deploy to Alpha Centauri. It was, and I cannot stress this enough, unbelievably good fun! We turned a pretty rough and traumatic job for little kids to be doing into something wildly entertaining. Couldn't wait to do it again! And it's not like the pigs care - they already lost ‘em. They aren't going to miss them any differently for going through the fan. We gleefully and without hesitation threw about 50 testicles through the ‘cannon’ in less than five minutes.
I was channeling my inner Nolan Ryan: rifling balls through the box. I was channeling my inner Greg Maddox: painting corners like an artist. I was channeling my inner John Elway: tossing bombs from 80 yards.
When we ran out of ammo we needed to switch to the other crates on the other side of the building anyway, so we moved our gear of knives, syringes and clippers across the aisle and as soon as we had more balls, we started throwing them balls!
Matter of fact, I think I do remember how it started. I think Sam went to discard a ball and it kind of stuck to the wall so we started throwing them all at each other and then we decided to try throwing through the fan.
I remember throwing the last one from the most recent crate we had just worked and laughing as we moved on to the next crate when all of a sudden mom was standing in the south double-doorway which we had open (it was summer; see picture above) and she SCREAMED at the top of her lungs “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU GUYS DOING?!?”
How could we have known that when we channeled our inner Randy Johnson, our mom would be channeling the bird? As Sam and I looked up, we saw two things.
First, we saw our mom madder than we've ever seen her. A fury with the power of 50 suns.
Second, she had bits of pig testicle stuck in her hair and on the side of her face. A fury with the power of 50 sons.
You see, what we didn't know is that mom was mowing (see picture above). And part of mowing the farm means mowing the east side of the farrowing house. This meant she was directly in the field of fire for our newly discovered ball launcher. But because of the noise inside and the fans running, we couldn’t hear the mower. We had no idea that a civilian was driving across the battlefield, about to get obliterated by friendly fire.
I don't know what the Vegas odds are or whether or not we should have bought a lottery ticket, but much to our luck (or chagrin), mom was mowing a path right in front of the fan that I had just thrown the freshest of all the pig nuts through, which was shot out of this testicle cannon (at a high rate of speed, of course), smoking Jo Kenkel, our mom, in the side of the head. Well, face. And if memory serves, sticking to her momentarily with what I've only imagined would be the most comical ‘thwap’ sound you've ever heard.
Real Tom and Jerry shit.
Sam and I did the only thing a couple of teenage boys could do - we took the verbal dressing-down while stifling laughter.
I'm just kidding. We lied our asses off!
I think I made up some BS on the fly about a nut not coming out and that it slipped out of Sam's hands when he pulled harder and through the miracle that is our lord and savior J. Helen Christ it got sucked into the fan. Certainly it was only accidental and bad luck that she was in front of the fan at the exact, unfortunate moment that Sam lost his grip. A genuine Greek tragedy. I may have even said that she shouldn't be mowing that side when we're doing this because it could be dangerous. Because of the slippage risk. Imagine if it had put out one of her eyes?! An honest-to-God two-for-one special!
But then she just had to ask about the other 50-plus balls littering the lawn like the universe’s weirdest rapture. She was wondering what she kept hitting with the mower. And despite all of that new information, she was still somehow mad at us! The pig jig was up.
When dad found out, our exchange went something like this:
Dad: “What the fuck did you shitheads do to piss your mother off so God damned bad?!”
Me: “Perhaps it would be better if we just showed you.”
Proceeds to enthusiastically show him…
Dad: “Now God dammit, you're going to break my fan!”
Nevermind that we had just (allegedly) slapped mom in the face with a hot n’ fresh pig ball. We need these fans to be in working order at all times!
I like to think that somewhere deep down dad was begrudgingly proud of us. After all, our commitment to the bit was unwavering. And it really was funny. Not that mom got hit, but that anyone got hit and it stuck to their face. And we got the work done. And he never had to pay us so even if we didn't get any other jobs done, a little game of “Call of Duty: Gonad Warfare” is a small price to pay for free labor.
The net of the whole incident was:
- We were never to throw anything through the fans again.
- We got a significant ass-chewing made harder because we had to try not to die laughing. 100% of mom's anger (justified) was directed at being remote-tea bagged. At least 60% of dad's anger was not because mom got hit in the face with a pig nut but because if we had time to throw testicles through the fan, we should have been doing other jobs. Production was paramount. This work isn’t going to do itself!
- We absolutely threw balls through the fans every time we worked pigs, for as long as we worked pigs. Huge fan of testicles getting shot into space. At a high rate of speed, of course!
And finally, we learned a valuable lesson: Check to make sure mom isn't around before we do something awesome.
It’s worth mentioning that this story isn’t about what happened to mom so much as it is about what happened that day. It’s also worth noting that, on that day, it’s very likely that Jo had already done several loads of laundry, probably cared for some animals, possibly driven a tractor somewhere, likely ran two or three errands for dad to get parts, definitely made lunch, probably had supper planned if not started, and managed to still find time to mow, too. So I understand how wildly angry she rightly should have been, running around trying to get everything done just to get hit in the face by an errant testicle because her kids “were fucking around again.”
For our part, though, I think it’s fair to say that Sam and I were sincerely sorry she got hit, but not sorry at all that we were doing what we were doing. Sometimes in life you are the free laborer. Sometimes you are the ventilation fan. Sometimes you are the pig getting castrated. And sometimes, when you least expect it, you are the mom getting hit in the face with a still-warm, still-beating pig testicle. We all have a role in this play. Life is full of ups and downs.
It’s up to you to grab it by the balls and show it who’s boss.
Epilogue
I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about Rocky Mountain Oysters (RMO) in more detail. More sickening, disgusting, abhorrent detail.
If you are brave or stupid, you can eat balls. How best to eat them is up for debate, but based on life experience and very nearly every single recipe you can search for, skinning, brining, slicing thin, pounding flat, breading and then frying the shit out of them is the most widely accepted way to eat them. Basically, you transform a throwaway organ into something else in order to hide the fact that they are the fruit from some critters’ loins.
Being an above-average home cook, I’m reasonably proficient at reading a recipe and deciding if it would be tolerable or not. So I spent a couple evenings reading recipes for cooking balls. Not the highlight of my literary journey, but necessary for the bit. Luckily, I didn’t see any recipes for testicle tartar. That would have been a flagrant foul. Or maybe a fragrant foul. Automatic ejection. Or maybe aeromatic ejection. I was, however, reminded of a lot of the other terms for RMO as I searched. And as a lover of old-timey phrases and all manner of cliches and idioms, it made me very happy. You might say I was ‘happier than a pig in shit’. And I haven’t felt like that since Shep was a pup.
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Pictured: Smoked Testicle Plate
Author's Note: If you were wondering if Chef Alan was my kind of guy, the caption for the photo at left (or above on mobile) on his website is "Try them on a charcuterie platter, and surprise everyone after the fact. No one needs to know."
While RMO is the most widely used name, you may have heard them referred to as such delicacies like cowboy caviar, Montana tenders, mountain tenders, huevos de toro, dusted nuts, swinging beef, the original sack lunch, prairie oysters, calf fries, or lamb fries. Rarely, unless you really have a death wish, would you include boar balls in that mix, because of all the reasons we outlined previously. I mean at that point, just find a nice gentleman and take him in your mouth. It would probably be a better (and almost assuredly tastier) experience than eating boar nuts, in any preparation method.
Brining seems to be a bit of a magic ingredient in successfully making eatable testicles. (Many things are edible. Not everything edible is eatable.) And if I were a gamblin’ man, I’d make the quick assumption that by slicing and pounding and breading and frying, you essentially are making it a more palatable, almost indistinguishable culinary delight akin to a chicken nugget or a fried pickle. It reminds me of when my grandma would make liver. She would cut it into ¼ inch thick slices, roll each slice in corn meal and fry them. These liver strips were delicious and I would always ask her if we could have liver. This led to me talking a big game about how much I liked liver because in my head, it was always thin fried strips that I could dip in a sauce and it was great. So one time I let someone talk me into liver and onions at a bar. They bring out a ten-ounce horror movie prop, expecting me to eat it loose. What a tragic day that was. Breading and frying can turn even the worst cut of meat into something salty and dippable and very nearly, if not completely, eatable.
Eventually, I stumbled upon a recipe for Smoked Rocky Mountain Oysters created by James Beard Award-winning chef, Alan Bergo. I found the recipe(8) on his website, ForagerChef.com.
His recipe was one of the most appetizing I had found. Again, brining was the magic that turned testes into besties. But his additional tactics of slowly cooking the ball before smoking it were unique and frankly the closest anyone has ever come to making me want to try these again. If you read the full recipe below, which you should do, he includes a double-marinating tactic that actually sounded kind of good. Like, I could see myself up in the mountains, eating a thin-sliced marinated ball sandwich, extra extra extra mayo. Honestly, the way Chef Alan prepares them, I imagine it isn’t much worse than braunschweiger, which probably has some balls in it anyway, and is a delight on toast. When it comes to eating land oysters, it’s either ‘lots of luck, gentlemen!’ or ‘ball appetit!’
There is no in-between.
(I've included the recipe below.)
References
- Cheney VT. A Brief History Of Castration. 2nd ed. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse; (2006). [Google Scholar]
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boar_taint
- A.A. Taylor et al. Behavioural responses of piglets to castration: the effect of piglet age Applied Animal Behaviour Science; (2001)
- Bonneau M, Weiler U. Pros and cons of alternatives to piglet castration: welfare, boar taint, and other meat quality traits. Animals (Basel). (2019) 9:884. doi: 10.3390/ani9110884, PMID: [PMC free article]
- Baldwin CM. A review of prevention and management of castration complications. Equine Vet Educ. (2024) 36:97–106. doi: 10.1111/eve.13880 [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]
- AVMA Literature review on the welfare implications of castration of cattle. (2014). 1–10.
- Pig Jig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3DMJ-j5TMY
- www.foragerchef.com
Special Thanks
As always, huge shout-out to E for proofing my work. He’s to the point where he knows if I made a choice or a mistake, and that’s something that especially you, but especially me can’t put a price on. Learn more about Eric here (http://www.ericdnelson.net/) and pick up his kids books that he wrote on Amazon.
A very special thank you to Prof. Dr. Johannes Kauffold for answering my email and allowing me to leverage the images cited throughout that he and his peers had used in some of their academic papers. I needed some good scientific images and I found what I was looking for in papers he had published with his peers on pig333.com. And because the world is super small, even though he lives across the ocean he’s actually been to my neck of the woods before for the World Pork Expo held in Des Moines. Super cool. Thanks again! I look forward to sharing a beer some day.
A very special thank you to Chef Alan Bergo for answering my email, letting me use pictures of his balls, and for committing to the bit with a very funny exchange. I sincerely appreciate it! I'd love to say I look forward to having your balls in my mouth one day, but....
And thanks to Satan and Izzy for providing me raw, unfiltered footage that really helped me take this all the way to eleven.
And thanks to Sammy for helping me with some of the facts. And for general bullshitting. And for doing the hard part, even though I think you hated it.
And sincere thanks to Jamii. Any successes I ever have writing are also your successes. FWIW, I literally reached out to my sources for this and did extra research work telling this story because one time you pushed me to interview both sides for a Tack article. That was probably the most important lesson you ever taught me - to dig deeper to find out the real story. I think it made this 3x longer that it would have been, but 100x better.
For more recipes, visit https://foragerchef.com/.
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At Left: Standard Castrating Attire & Attitude