It was never a place too crazy to bring kids-in their twenty-five years of operation, he said, they’d never had a single brawl. He said that he and his wife, Tifini, who now run the bar and festival together, wanted to make sure their community had a place where anyone could afford to celebrate their fathers. They may not be the largest or the most prominent ball-eating event, TJ told me over the phone in the weeks leading up to the festival, but they are the most family-friendly. That the event came to be held over Father’s Day weekend speaks mostly to Ron’s bawdy sense of humor, but it’s also helped the Ashland Testicle Festival find a counterintuitive niche. Eventually, his party grew from a few hundred attendees to upward of thirty-seven hundred-some years they have even hired headlining country artists like Neal McCoy to perform. That is, at least, how TJ’s father, Ron, the original proprietor of Round the Bend, came to be inspired to create a ticketed yearly event called Testicle Festival. Testicles, in this tradition, are a delicacy, enjoyed tossed on the coals of a campfire, brought home to share, or, in Nebraska, carried to Round the Bend Steakhouse after a long day, tossed on the grill, and chased with a few Budweisers. There, in keeping with the tradition of honoring the Earth and its inhabitants, nothing goes to waste, including in spring when young cattle are branded and castrated. According to The Oxford Companion to Food, the tradition of eating testicles in spring is common, at least in pastoral communities where cattle farming is a way of life. The cultural and historical origins of these events are humble by comparison. Chuck Palahniuk once wrote an essay about the selfsame event that opened with a woman slicked with whipped cream and chocolate pudding deep-throating a cowboy onstage, to an audience whooping like frenzied hyenas. That festival, more commonly known by its attendees as “Testy Festy,” had been infamous for its debauchery and violence-fights, fatal crashes, and stabbings were all but expected. Right before I arrived in Ashland, papers reported that another, more prominent Testicle Festival just two states north in Montana had been shut down for good after two people were struck and killed by a shuttle hijacked by a drunken attendee. Many of them, as you might expect, have a reputation for being the stuff of frat-house nightmares, and I admit that I was a little anxious about what I might find in Nebraska. Testicle Festivals of all shapes and sizes have been held regularly across the country, from California to Oklahoma to Virginia. While the Testicle Festival in Ashland is well attended, it isn’t singular in form. They are deep-fried, then wedged ten or twelve to a red-check paper tray, with a piece of rye bread, a pickle chip, and a squirt of a ketchup-based dip called cock sauce. Lately, to keep prices low enough that everyone who works in and around Ashland might attend-bikers, farmers, mechanics, attorneys, accountants-only cow testicles are used, about twenty-two hundred pounds of them, shipped in from all over the country and processed an hour’s drive away in Diller, Nebraska.
(No, you can’t call them Rocky Mountain oysters, one testicle enthusiast explained to me-that term is reserved exclusively for pig nuts.) But years ago, the Testicle Festival showcased a menagerie of animal testicles: beef, pork, lamb, and, more unexpectedly, turkey. My tasting experience is limited to bull nuts, testicles shorn from male cows in spring so their testosterone levels remain relatively low, leaving the animals relatively placid and their meat tender enough to sell at market. Instead, cow testicles taste, simply, like offal-toothsome and musky, the occasional gristle between your teeth, like an afterthought.
They don’t taste like meat or like morels, though I was impressed with the suggestion, given to me by a Nebraskan gourmand who claimed he comes to the event known as the Testicle Festival-held annually over Father’s Day weekend at Round the Bend Steakhouse, in Ashland-because he thinks of cow balls as an affordable alternative to rare mushrooms. Nor, when battered thickly with flour and tossed into searing oil, do they taste like chicken-fried steak. Let’s get it out of the way: No, testicles do not taste like chicken.