CHITLINS 2005

By Frederick A. Hurst

Introduction

Cooking soul food for New Year’s Day is one of our most treasured traditions. The menu varies by family but mine usually includes, rice and black-eyed peas, collard greens, macaroni and cheese, pig feet, hog maws and the inimitable chitlins (chitterlings for the unsophisticated). Every New Year’s Day, I invite family and friends over for a soul food feast that I prepare and cook myself (with the exception of my mother’s much sought after macaroni and cheese). And each year I make a peculiar observation about the chitlins. The fact is that no matter how many chitlins I cook for New Year’s Day or how many people show up for the meal, at the end of the day, there are never any chitlins left over.

The History

Chitlins have quite a history. They are actually the pig’s intestines, which the slave master discarded along with the feet, tails, ears and stomach (hog maws). Black folks learned early on that these were all imminently edible parts of the pig. But chitlins are more than just edible. They are a delightful delicacy, a secret that, until recently, Black folks were smart enough to keep hidden from White folks. In fact, older Black folks have always considered White folks pretty dumb for tossing out the best part of the pig. I mean, a pork chop can’t even remotely match the flavor of a chitlin no more than kale can compare to properly cooked collard greens. But if White folks chose to eat pork chops and smoked ham and throw away the chitlins, that was their loss and our well kept secret.

The Discovery

But somehow White folks discovered chitlins anyway, probably because Black folks talked too much. The Black Power movement of the sixties, with its “in your face” rhetoric, made some good points but it also revealed some good cultural secrets. And chitlins was one of them. And now a food that White folks once gave away to Black folks and then sold to us for next to nothing in soiled and unsightly buckets is now being sold to the general public bleach-cleaned in neat packages in city and suburban supermarkets at much higher prices, and soul food restaurants have moved into the mainstream of White America.

The Recovery

The chitlins secret would have been exposed long ago if not for the overpowering odor of dirty chitlins and the hours of hard work required to clean them. If you plan for a big chitlins meal, you can’t clean and cook the chitlins in the same day. You have to start cleaning days ahead of time. To give you an example of what is involved, after cleaning a ten pound bucket of chitlins, you’d be lucky if you had two pounds of good chitlins left…that is if you cleaned them right. And no self-respecting chitlins eater would eat half cleaned chitlins, no more than a self-respecting host would invite guests over to eat them…and even then, they wouldn’t invite them over until the house aired out for a day or so. I say ban pre-cleaned chitlins and bring back the dirty buckets. Maybe, if White folks are forced to clean their own, they’ll cut chitlins from their diet and let us enjoy our ethnic specialty at a reasonable price again.

The Mystery

But I digressed. My tale is about the chitlin mystery, which has nothing to do with White folks directly. No matter what I do, at the end of every New Year’s meal, the chitlins are always all gone. I’ve tested it! I thought I was making a smart move when I increased the veggies and starches but folks didn’t bite. They ate the same amount. The dumbest move I made was to increase the amount of chitlins that I cleaned and served. After all of my extra work, no chitlins survived the day anyway. One year I simply cut down on the number of people I invited, but those who remained simply used it as an opportunity to eat more chitlins. I did notice, however, that my guests always left some pig feet and that’s why I tried what I now call the “pig feet rebellion.”

The Pig Feet Rebellion

One New Year’s Day, I cut way back on the chitlins and dramatically increased the pig feet. I placed the chitlins in the back of the banquet table and gave the pig feet a place of prominence and simply proclaimed them to be the main meal. Well, before the pig feet were touched, the first guests to the table gobbled up the limited chitlins. The remaining guests reluctantly and grudgingly ate pig feet and I spent the day and the entire next year listening to complaints from relatives and friends who didn’t get any chitlins. Needless to say, my rebellion didn’t last long but it led me to finally give up trying to temper my guests’ ever-expanding capacity for consuming chitlins.

The Surrender

This year, I completely surrendered and bought twice the amount of chitlins. (Thanks to White folks’ entry into the chitlins market, I was able to buy pre-cleaned chitlins.) I also cooked my normal amount of pig feet and I inadvertently invited fewer guests. The chitlins disappeared as usual and the left-over pig feet will last me for six months. But, more important, when I want to eat some of my New Year’s 2005 chitlins, I simply take them out of the freezer where I wisely stored my post-New Year's share before my guests even arrived.

(Some portions of this article are real and some fiction but it was all fun to write.)