I stand corrected
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Chitlins:They Have Many Adherents Among Brave Food Lovers (Wall Street Journal)�Ž
By Elena De Lisser
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
Monday, March 8, 1999
Estella Buchanan of Ogden, Utah, sounds like a regular Julia Child as she
describes the preparation of one of her favorite dishes. The ingredients,
including onions, garlic, celery and carrots, simmer in a heavy iron pot for
about three hours. "It's a delicacy," she says.
Oh, and the main ingredient in Mrs. Buchanan's stew? The intestines of the
pig -- chitlins to those in the know.
These days, the number who do know is growing: Lundy Packing Co., a pork processor in Clinton, N.C., says it produced about 5.8 million pounds of
"chitts" last year, about six times as much as five years ago. Smithfield
Foods Inc., the nation's largest pork producer in Smithfield, Va., turned out more than 15 million pounds of chitlins last year.
In Murfreesboro, N.C., E. Frank Stephenson Jr. has sold more than 5,000
copies of the "Great American Chitlin Cookbook" -- almost all through word of mouth. "A lot of people say they don't like them, but they're closet chitlin eaters," he says.
Meanwhile, there's at least one business whose sole reason for being is to
bring fresh chitlins to the people. The Chitlin Market, a mail-order specialty meat market owned by Shauna Anderson, a former statistician for the Internal Revenue Service, sells chitlins over the Internet and through a small storefront in Hyattsville, Md.
In this fat-conscious era, chitlins are holding their own. Never mind that a
3-ounce serving contains 258 calories and 24 grams of fat. "Only margarine
or shortening would top that," says Fabiola Gaines, a registered dietitian who lives in Orlando, Fla. (To put that in context, a 3-ounce serving of lean sirloin steak has 6 grams of fat.)
Chitlins, formally called chitterlings, casually called "chitts," and occasionally referred to as "Kentucky oysters" or "wrinkled steak," are a food steeped in historical controversy. According to Sharon Tyler Herbst, a San Francisco food historian, the word "chitterling" has its roots in Middle English.
"It meant 'body organ,' and the Europeans were eating these things in massive quantities in the 13th century," says Mrs. Tyler Herbst. "Europeans
have long eaten every part of the beastie."
Many Americans think of chitlins as Southern "soul food" in the same league
as ham hocks, yams, corn bread and collard greens -- and with origins in
slavery. Chitlins, it has been said, were a discarded part of the pig that the master didn't eat, so he fed them to his slaves.
Indeed, after Gregory Freeman, a columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
extolled chitlins a few years ago, he got nasty notes from some African-American readers. Said one: "Chitlins are the food of the oppressors," Mr. Freeman recalls.
Untrue, says Howard Paige, a food historian in Southfield, Mich. Mr. Paige
says that in the rural South, chitlins were considered a delicacy that both
blacks and whites enjoyed in hog-killing season. For lack of refrigeration,
they couldn't be preserved, so they weren't a staple in anyone's diet.
Still, they certainly remain a food of the common man. A 10-pound container
of raw, uncleaned chitlins can be had at some markets for about $9. But in
Atlanta, the capital of the new South, chitlins are not served in a single highly ranked restaurant in the Zagat Survey. And in New York, they are frowned on even at some expensive restaurants that serve tripe (the lining of the cow stomach) and other variety meats.
At Daniel, a celebrated French restaurant just off Park Avenue, Chef Daniel
Boulud's menu occasionally boasts pied du cochon (y'all can just call them
pig's feet) and pig ears. But don't look for pig intestines there. "Chitlins may be where the line is drawn," says Georgette Farkas, the restaurant's
spokeswoman.
That stigma has driven some folks underground, to enjoy their fried, barbecued or broiled chitlins behind closed doors. "To people outside your family, you don't admit to it," says Mr. Freeman, the St. Louis columnist.
"But it's sort of like watching the Three Stooges. Let's face it, they're on the air because somebody's watching them."
So what exactly is the problem with chitlins?
Fat is one thing. Fabiola Gaines's husband, Charlie, is a recovering chit-o-holic. For most of his life, he got cravings for chitlins served on rice with hot sauce.
In his prime chitlin-eating days, Mr. Gaines, 57, boasts that he could polish off a 20-ounce serving in one sitting. That's about 160 grams of fat -- or slightly more than you would get from eating three pints of Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey premium ice cream.
Mr. Gaines, a federal mediator, lost his lust for chitlins after his wife showed him a heaping plate of raw chitlin fat.
For those unfazed by that, there's the time and labor intensity associated
with cleaning chitlins. The process, which can take four hours, entails turning the intestines inside out to scrub away fecal matter and bacteria.
Indeed, many people refuse to eat chitlins in the home of someone they don't
know well. "It's almost a taboo. We don't eat everybody's chitlins," says
Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois, who ordered 50 pounds of chitlins
for his Thanksgiving dinner last year. "The person who prepares them, you've got to know real well."
To top everything off, there's the smell -- some say stench -- during the two-plus-hour cooking process. Some say it's akin to being inside a sewage-treatment plant, while others describe the odor as that of boiling
dirty socks.
"When you cook chitlins, that's the only time when flies are trying to get out of the house," quips Bob Scott, a former governor of North Carolina and
current member of the Wake County Chitlin Club in Raleigh. The group, made up of distinguished North Carolina politicians, judges, lawyers and other assorted state officials, meets annually to tell jokes, catch up on local
gossip and, of course, eat chitlins.
For all the chitlin lovers, there are plenty of others who abhor the whole
idea. "I guess you could stand around a skunk long enough and get used to that smell, too," says Michael Moore, a courier in Temple Hill, Md.
Mr. Moore, 41, still remembers the cold winter day when he first encountered chitlins. He was eight years old and visiting an aunt when she threw some chitlins into a frying pan for breakfast. Mr. Moore vividly recalls holding his breath and scampering outside into the freezing cold. "Anything was better than being indoors with that smell," he says.
Unfortunately, Mr. Moore is in the minority in his family. Every year, around New Year's, which is when his wife and children look forward to this chewy treat, Mr. Moore finds himself doing sneaky things to thwart them. He isn't above hiding the container in the back of the fridge in the hope that the chitlins will be forgotten. Occasionally, he has "forgotten" to relay phone messages to his wife from her chitlin-preparing friends who call to say the chitts are ready to be picked up.
"I'll go to all lengths to try to get them not to eat chitlins," he says, "but they do it anyhow."
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http://www.jessejacksonjr.com/issues/i030899492.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitterlings
and yet we continue to eat them. Why?
"That swine will kill you!" So will any damn thing if you eat too much of it! Pardon my French but fuck what you heard! Pork got us through 400 years of oppression and we mastered that bitch and I'll be damned if I give it up because another man criticizes it. 
