Name: Clay Newcomb Explains the Metaphor of "Bear Grease"
Uploaded: 2021-06-26T18:21:42.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Clay Newcomb Explains the Metaphor of "Bear Grease"' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-06-26. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Clay Newcomb Explains the Metaphor of "Bear Grease"' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-06-26. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan experience. Tell me what you got there. You know talking about
bear
grease and trying to connect it to a podcast. I mean at some point I'll have
to explain the metaphor of bear grease. What's explaining now? Well so bear
grease at one time was this highly valued commodity. I mean used as a unit
of currency on the American frontier. And bear grease, bear oil would be the
rendered fat of a bear that would turn into liquid. Like this right here. This
is
for you. Thank you. Have you ever had, I mean I know you've bear hunted, but
have you
had bear grease before? No, I've eaten bear. I've never rendered bear fat or
cooked anything in bear fat. I've only just taken the meat and cooked it.
Usually
slow cooking. So what you would do with that is you would cook with it. You
would
fry with it. You can make pastries with it. You can use it to condition leather.
It's supposed to be amazing for pastries, right? For like pie crust.
Yep. And so there was a time when bear grease, bear lard was super valuable on
the frontier
before refrigeration because bear fat stayed, didn't go rancid as quickly as
pork lard.
So like on there, you would have pork and bear would be essentially the places
where you would
get it. This lasted longer. That'll last on the shelf at your house, unrefrigerated
for over a year.
Why does it last so much longer?
Just whatever the constituency of bear lard is, it just stays good for that
long.
So going back to this metaphor of the name of bear grease, in our podcast, we're
exploring things.
And even in the tagline of the podcast, we say that we're exploring things that
are forgotten,
but relevant. And we're searching for insight in unlikely places. And so like
this bear, bear grease,
I brought you some stuff that you can do with bear grease. This is a, this is a
bear fat lye soap.
If you've, if you ever used animal tallow soap, like just for like bathing,
washing your hands, man,
that's incredible stuff.
Yeah, it really is a hundred percent all natural. I mean, it's, it's, it's a,
it's a ancient process of using lye and animal tallow.
What is lye exactly?
Lye is, uh, doggone, if you hadn't asked me, it's, it's, I mean, it's, uh, it's
a chemical. It's a caustic chemical that you can buy just about anywhere.
But, uh, shoot, it's like, it's like H2 something, something that they used to
use ash.
Oh, they use, they, they, they, they got the lye from ash and, uh,
it's a metal hydroxide traditionally obtained by leaching wood ashes or a
strong alkali,
which is highly soluble in water producing caustic.
NaOH, sodium, sodium hydroxide. That's what it is.
So they would get it from like burning wood?
Yeah. So they, they, the real primitive method for making soap from, from
animal tallow.
And you could use, you could make animal tallow soap out of anything, but bare
fat lye soap is, uh, is, is our specialty.
Now, but it, um, it's supposed to be real good for your skin.
It's supposed, you know, because it's.
Do you sell this?
No.
You say our specialty, you never sell it.
Just give it away.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
This is not, not for sale.
Just, uh, but.
Did you make this?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so what are the, what's the ingredients?
So just lye and.
Four, four ingredients.
Bare fat, sodium hydroxide, lye, water, and then just essential oils.
We just.
For the smell?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it smells real good.
Yeah.
What are the essential oils?
Smells like one of them stores.
We had a bunch of different kinds of oils that we added in, like peppermint,
whatever.
I don't know.
Sometimes I'm amazed at how, uh, you know, kind of like hygiene conscious us
bear hunters
are like making soap and stuff because the other thing I brought you, Joe, and
I know
you don't, you don't, you don't run a beard, but, uh, this is some bear grease
beard oil
that I made, and so that is a combination of three things.
So it's, it's cheating just a little bit, but it's, it's, it's one part bear
oil, one part almond oil, one part jojoba oil, and then essential oils.
And I mean, you can drip it out, put it on your hands and, uh, Ooh, that smells
good.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
And then the last one here, and then I'll start talking about my metaphor again,
if, if you're, if you want, but this is a bear grease hand salve.
And so bear oil has all kinds of folklore around it.
And I'm in the process of like an anecdotal research, very serious project of
exploring all these folk tales of bear grease and bear oil.
And so it's healing properties.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They, they say, I mean, back in the day, bear oil would have been used to
relieve arthritis pain.
Um, they say, and you can find this all over the internet that bear oil cures
baldness,
which obviously is like a big piece of folklore, but it's still just fun.
But going back to the idea that bear grease has all these uses is that this is
thing that at one time was a currency.
And if you polled the United States, 330 million Americans, and you said, what
is bear grease?
I mean, like what percentage of people would even know what it was?
Probably like 1% of 1%.
Yeah.
So it's been forgotten.
And so there was a time when, so there's an archaic unit of measure of a bear
oil.
They used to take the tanned neck hide of a deer, which would have been a part
of the, the buck skin that wasn't usable, the neck hide.
And they would have sewed it together and they would have used it to have
stored bear oil.
And they called it an eel.
And so they would make a container out of it, like a wine flask almost.
An eel of bear oil.
Huh.
And it's just a wonder.
Spell it like eel?
Well, it's, you know, it's been probably 10 years since I've actually seen it
written.
It's, I think it's E L L E.
Like, um, an eel of bear oil would have been a unit of measurement.
So, like, you could have gone to the store and you're like, well, I got two eels,
bear oil, you know, I'd like some flour, I'd like some whatever.
Wow.
And, you know, it's just, it's a wonder that we don't call the U.S. dollar, you
know, an eel.
Do you see what I'm saying?
You know, because the buck is essentially connected to the value of a white-tailed
deerskin that was tanned out and ready for tanning.
And that became equivalent to a buck.
For one dollar.
For one dollar.
Wow.
And so, so again, this idea that there's some pretty amazing stuff that's
forgotten.
And then as hunters, we're very interested in using as much as we can from
these animals that we're taking.
Very interested in that.
And so, a bear offers a whole nother market of commodity that really no other
big game offers in that, you know, of the big game that we hunt, like, let's
say an elk.
I mean, like, you know, you're going to, you're going to keep the meat,
obviously.
That's the number one thing.
You're going to keep his horns.
But very few people would even keep the hide of that animal.
And certainly, they're not rendering down elk tallow.
White-tailed deer would have the same sequence of usable commodities.
Man, a black bear.
We have incredible meat.
We, I would, I would venture to say that 90%, maybe 80% of black bears that are
killed in North America, their hides are tanned.
They have, usually, especially in the fall, will have an incredible amount of
fat, which can be rendered down into all these incredible, healthy, usable
products.
And so, I mean, like, we have, we use, my point is we use more of a bear than
we do almost any other big game animal that we hunt.
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