Minnesota Meat Raffle

A Midwestern phenomenon I can get behind...

“Wanna go to a meat raffle?”

Um, hell yeah I do!

And so began my fascination with this unusual social phenomenon popular in the Midwest, New England and beyond.

You could be forgiven for thinking that a meat raffle is an especially spicy party at a leather bar. I mean, my inner 13-year-old snickered, too. But in reality it’s a fairly wholesome tradition where local butchers offer meat trays to local groups raising money for charity, trays that are then raffled off in bars and VFW halls.

Yes, meat trays. As in fantastical arrays of fleisch und wurst, steaks and ground meat, chicken, sometimes seafood — I’ve seen lobster tails! — roasts, pork, and especially sausages. The Weiner Tower is an especially coveted prize at one meat raffle I have been to — and yes, they are absolutely encouraging that smirk on your face right now.

My friend Jaime loves meat raffles, so she has been my guide on this magical meaty tour. That day she asked me, she told me to meet her at Heldt’s Bar in Mayer, Minnesota. Not my usual stomping grounds, Mayer is about an hour west of St. Paul, just south of her hometown of Watertown.

Heldt’s is exactly the sort of bar where a meat raffle should take place. Rough, but not like a biker bar, just… well loved. A dive. But, importantly, a dive where the community gathers. Every good meat raffle is at a divey place. It’s part of the charm, the blue-collar vibe.

I know of one meat raffle at a bougie Minneapolis bar, where the trays are all fawncy, organic blah blah blah. Sorry, man, just stop. Meat raffles are for drinking Hamm’s if you’re on the St. Paul side of the Mississippi, Grain Belt on the Minneapolis side. You eat crappy chicken wings, greasy burgers, maybe a war crime of a taco served in a hard shell with iceberg lettuce and meat “seasoned” with McCormick’s mild taco seasoning. Coney dogs are my fave.

You know the place. In fact, if you’ve watched the movies “Downtown Owl” or “Grumpy Old Men,” you’ve literally seen it. I’ve been to meat raffles at The Spot, which was the bar in “Owl,” as well as Half Time Rec, which was Slippery’s in “Grumpy Old Men.” Both are in St. Paul.

Conjure an image of a vaguely seedy, yet welcoming, Midwestern dive bar, and that’s what you’re looking for. The scent of fryer grease, stale beer, sweat and bad perfume lingers in corners, country music blares — in this case “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” by Trace Adkins — the hubub of quiet conversations underlying everything.

At Heldt’s, the meat array was laid out on the pool table covered by a plastic checkered tablecloth. No ice. But it was winter, so who cared? The Vikings were choking as usual, so that was the topic of conversation in a bar absolutely buzzing… at 4:30 p.m.

Because yes, folks, early starts are a feature of meat raffles. This is for a few reasons. First, it gets people in the bar at otherwise slow hours. And you drink when you’re at a bar. Natch. Second, meat raffles are all about charity, so there are often kids running around, either selling raffle tickets or talking about the cause we’re all there for.

Sometimes it’s to raise money for a school trip, sometimes for sports or band equipment, or for a sick member of the community, or for the local firehouse or food shelf. This last one always amuses me, because, well, why not just donate the meat? My guess is they raise more cash with the raffle, but who knows?

About that meat. This is where we get to real origin of meat raffles.

At least in the Midwest, the synergy between small town butcher shops and small town bars, beer halls or social clubs created the raffle sometime in the 1800s. Germans and Czechs are the likely originators, but no one really knows. A butcher would donate some of his wares to the beer hall, where they’d be raffled off. In the process, the butcher would get a captive audience for several hours who would remember who provided the meat because his logo, address, and phone number was on every tray.

This pattern hasn’t changed. We are blessed in the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa to have lots and lots of family-owned, local butchers who have survived the tyranny of the supermarket. Many have been in business a century, and are cherished heirlooms of towns throughout the region.

Uncle Ron’s Smokehouse supplied the bounty for the raffle at Heldt’s, Borchert’s Meat Market at the most recent one I went to, last week at Half Time Rec. At Heldt’s, Jaime and I sat down at a high top, anticipation high. She ordered a Mich Golden Light, I ordered a Grain Belt. You don’t drink big, fancy beers at a meat raffle. Not only does it run against the ethos of the affair, but you’re also likely to be drinking four to eight, so if you’re knockin’ back big IPAs you’ll get potted in a hurry. You need to keep your wits about you.

The waitress came by and we each paid $2 for a ticket. That’s a wild thing about meat raffles: I’ve never seen a ticket more than $5. So if you win, the reward for your bet can be substantial. In Minnesota, tickets are little pieces of paper with your number printed on them. I hear in New England, paddles with a number are more common — meaning you have the same number throughout the raffle. In Canada, there’s a thing called Meat Darts, where you play darts for meat prizes. I can get behind that.

Oh, and another awesome little bit of Midwestern love: Most meat raffles only allow you to buy one ticket per round, and the waitresses offer tickets from opposite sides of the bar each round, so if you missed a chance to get in on the action on one round, they start with you next.

This little bit of democratic socialism warms my heart. I don’t care how rich you are, what you do in the community — you could be the town banker, or a wealthy farmer —you still only have the one chance to win. I always get grumpy at the “capitalist” raffles, where, in theory, one person could buy all the tickets. Bleh.

I soon realized why Jaime likes meat raffles: She wins. I’ve been to three with her, and no matter if her boyfriend Connor, her high school friends, or our mutual friends come with (yes, I am using that very Midwestern construction on purpose, don’t ya know), she always wins.

Last week she won on the first round, and the haul was massive: snack sticks, giant mutant chicken breasts, sausage and a steak. Now etiquette kicks in: Once you win, lay back, at least for a round or three. Lady Luck can be weird, and we’ve all seen that one table that wins over and over at raffles. Do that at a rural meat raffle and they’ll run you out of town on a rail.

I love this. It’s a quiet recognition that we are part of a community. Meat, historically so prized and valued, is to be shared, not hoarded. It’s showy and greedy and “extra” to want to win more than once.

I had resigned myself to simply basking in the glow of Jaime’s winnings. After nearly a dozen meat raffles, I had yet to win. No weiner tower for me, alas. But you can’t win if you’re not in, so I bought tickets at every round last week.

My ritual is to never look at the number after I pick one up randomly from the tray of little folded scraps of paper. It’s bad luck. Ticket bought, Jaime and Alan, who was a meat raffle virgin, and I returned to chatting about weird mushrooms and other geeky matters, like which chanterelle species is best.

“Number Seven! Number SEVEN!”

We all turned over our bits of paper. And there it was: Number seven. I let out my best barbaric yawp, which probably sounded more like, ja, hey, you betchya dat’s me!!! and bounded up to the table to grab my meat.

We were mostly through the raffle by then, but I spied a packet that had a pretty packet of bratwurst in it, plus loose Italian sausage, country pork ribs, and some weird beef eye round thingy I didn’t recognize. I am a sucker for a nice sausage, so had to have it. I returned to the table, beaming.

The next day, I decided to brown the loose Italian sausage and the eye round “steaks,” which had been pre-spiced, and use them for my famous New Jersey red sauce. I added bits of things from my kitchen, old onions, a half a goose breast minced up, some chopped fennel bulb, and as my house began to smell like a home, I thought about how wonderfully communal these events are.

And it’s not just meat raffles. There’s a thing called plant bingo, where you play bingo for potted plants — a fantastic, vegetarian-friendly version of a meat raffle. And animal bingo is my fave. I have a dear friend who always tries to attend the “chicken shit bingo” games at a little rural bar in North Dakota. I have another friend who told me that at homecoming football games, they set up a grid, let cows onto the field, and wherever one dropped a cow pie, that number won a huge tray of meat. Cow shit bingo!? I am still laughing about this as I type.

It’s March now, our winter is ending. Meat raffles go on year round, but to me they are a winter thing. We hunker down so much in the Great Dark. A late afternoon or early evening meat raffle is just the thing to get us out of our nests and into our community. A place to meet friends, make new ones, hoist a beer or six — Hamm’s for me, please — and maybe, just maybe, come home flush with some tasty meat from your local butcher.

I am not mad at that. At all.