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Breaded Bear Paws
Here's how to handle your next bear: hack off his paws and set them to soak in a salty, winey marinade for two or three days. Then stew with ham trimmings and tasty vegetables for seven or eight hours; cool them, dry them, slice lengthwise in four parts, pepper with cayenne, roll in melted lard and bread crumbs, broil half an hour, serve with red-currant jelly and who's afraid of the big black bear!
But let's stick to commoner game.
This is a period hunting-camp note rather than a workable recipe, and both the law and food safety have moved on since it was written.
- Bear paws are the one part you cannot legally possessBear paws are heavily restricted -- trade in bear paws and gall bladders is prohibited or tightly restricted in many US states and Canadian provinces, and international trade in bear species is controlled under CITES. Possession of paws from a bear legally taken under licence may be lawful where it was taken, but buying, selling, or transporting them frequently is not. Check the current law where you are.
- Trichinella is endemic in bearBear is one of the most common sources of human trichinellosis in North America, and the parasite in bear meat is comparatively cold-tolerant, so freezing does not reliably kill it. The only control is verified internal temperature throughout, which a soak-stew-broil sequence written without a thermometer does not provide.
- The marinade is not a preservation stepTwo or three days in salted wine is a flavouring soak, not a cure. There are no measured salt concentrations, no nitrite, and no refrigeration specified, which is exactly the gap that makes the instruction unusable today.
- No temperatures anywhere"Stew seven or eight hours" and "broil half an hour" describe duration only. Long stewing may well have been sufficient in practice, but nothing in the text lets a cook confirm it, and with a parasite risk this specific, confirmation is the whole point.
- Melted lard and crumbsThe breading step is a straightforward period technique: fat first as glue, dry crumbs second, then dry heat to set the crust. It appears here on a cut nobody should be cooking, but the method itself is unremarkable.
- If you want the dishUse a current, tested recipe for legally taken game with a thermometer-based endpoint, and choose a different cut and a different animal.