chitterlings

The small intestines of pigs, especially when cooked and eaten as food.

[From Middle English chiterling, probably diminutive of Old English *cieter, intestines.]

The (usually fried) small intestine of ox, calf, or pig.

[CHIHT-lihnz; CHIHT-lingz] Popular in American Southern cooking, chitterlings are the small intestines of freshly slaughtered pigs. The word itself comes from the Middle English chiterling, a derivative of the Old English cieter ("intestines"). And, although properly called "chitterlings," the more common usage is chitlins, the casual version of which is chitts; slang terms include Kentucky oysters and wrinkled steak. Chitlins must be thoroughly cleaned in order to remove all fecal matter and bacteria. This labor-intensive process, which requires turning the intestines inside out, can take hours. Once cleaned, chitterlings must be simmered until tender (2 to 3 hours), a process that emits a detestable stench. They can then be broiled, barbecued, added to soups, battered and fried or used as a sausage casing. Chitlins have a chewy texture and an extremely high fat content (24 grams per 3-ounce serving). See also variety meats.

Chitlins or chitterlings, the small intestines harvested from a hog, are a frugal staple of myriad cuisines. After being soaked, thoroughly scraped, and cleaned, chitterlings have long been stuffed with forcemeats and spices and served as sausages. But chitterlings usage has never been limited to sausage making.

In England, cooks combine diced, sautéed chitterlings with mashed potatoes, form the mix into rounds, cap the resulting dumplings with grated cheese, and term the dish Down Derry. In and around Lyon, France, chitterlings, or andouillettes, are fried in lard or butter and served with vinegar and parsley.

No matter the cuisine or continent, chitterlings have long signaled linkage to the farm-based butchery of pigs. In rural districts worldwide, the cold weather killing of a pig and the removal of the chitterlings is a ritual of great import. In the American South, chitterlings, pulled hot from a cauldron of simmering water and eaten with a dose of vinegary or peppery condiment, are considered by many to be a reward for the hard work of farm-based butchery. This farm-to-table linkage has acquired special significance in the American South, where chitterlings (termed "chitlins" by most in an approximation of the prevailing pronunciation) have come to acquire a cultural importance that arguably exceeds traditional culinary usage.

In the book Chitlin Strut and Other Madrigals, the novelist and essayist William Price Fox of South Carolina asks the rhetorical question, "Who will eat a chitlin?" The answer: "You take a man and tie him to a stake and feed him bread and water and nothing else for seven days and seven nights, and then he will eat a chitlin. He won't like it, but he will eat it." Fox ascribes to the idea of chitlins as a marker of poverty. According to this often espoused rationale, chitlins and other pork offal products have long been a staple of the southern diet, and their presence was dictated not by preference but by a poverty-engendered creativity that could be claimed by all denizens of rural and impoverished southern districts.

White rural Southerners of the twentieth century, faced with the prospect of a rapidly industrializing and homogenizing region, doted on both boiled and deep-fried chitterlings. For these men and women, chitterlings served as both symbol and sustenance. By mid-century there were active chitterling eating clubs, like the Royal Order of Chitlin Eaters of Nashville, Tennessee, and the Happy Chitlin Eaters of Raleigh, North Carolina. The traditional song "Chitlin Cookin' Time in Cheatham County" gives voice to the same:

There's a quiet and peaceful county in the state of Tennessee

You will find it in the book they call geography

Not famous for its farming, its mines, or its stills

But they know there's chitlin cookin' in them Cheatham County hills

When it's chitlin cookin' time in Cheatham County I'll be courtin' in them Cheatham County hills

And I'll pick a Cheatham County chitlin cooker

I've a longin' that the chitlins will fill

African Americans with roots in the rural South also claimed a specific cultural meaning for chitlins. At an early date, forced reliance upon offal marked the foods of black southerners with a meaning different from those of whites. Until emancipation, African American food choice was restricted by the dictates of white society. Despite these restrictions, perhaps even as a retort of sorts, African Americans fashioned a cuisine of their own. Laws may have been enacted to regulate slave dress and codify slave mores, but in the kitchen freedom of expression was tolerated, even encouraged. As a result, African American cooks reinterpreted traditional foodways in an African-influenced manner and claimed chitterlings as distinctly African American.

Chitterling imagery pervades African American culture. The informal circuit of juke joints and clubs patronized by African Americans has long been called the "Chitlin Circuit." The bluesman Mel Brown, a veteran of the circuit, chose to title his early 1970s greatest hits album Eighteen Pounds of Unclean Chitlins and Other Greasy Blues Specialties.

When soul food came to the fore in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s, chitlins—along with watermelons and okra—were celebrated as a cultural sacrament. But not all African Americans embraced chitterlings as a preferred marker of identity. "You hear a lot of jazz about soul food," observed Eldridge Cleaver in 1968. "Take chitterlings: the ghetto blacks eat them from necessity while the black bourgeoisie has turned it into a mocking slogan . . . . Now that they have the price of a steak, here they come prattling about Soul Food."

The novelist Ralph Ellison understood how chitterlings functioned as both preferred cultural marker and liability. In the novel Invisible Man (1952), the protagonist imagines a scenario wherein he accuses Bledsoe, a pompous but influential educator, of a secret love of chitterlings:

I saw myself advancing upon Bledsoe . . . and suddenly whipping out a foot or two of chitterlings, raw, uncleaned, and dripping sticky circles on the floor as I shake them in his face, shouting: "Bledsoe, you're a shameless chitterling eater! I accuse you of relishing hog bowels! Ha! And not only do you eat them, you sneak and eat them in private when you think you're unobserved! You're a sneaking chitterling lover!"

Bibliography

Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952.

Fox, William Price. Chitlin Strut and Other Madrigals. Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1983.

Schwabe, Calvin W. Unmentionable Cuisine. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979.

—John T. Edge

Cross-sectional rings of the large intestine of the pig; usually deepfried quickly to a crackling, crisp delicacy.

Chitlins in broth.

The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article or discuss the issue on the talk page.

Chitterlings (often pronounced /ˈtʃɪtlɪnz/ and sometimes spelled chitlins or chittlins in vernacular) are the viscera intestines of a pig that have been prepared as food. In various countries across the world, such food is prepared and eaten either as part of a daily diet, or at special events, holidays or religious festivities.

Contents 1 Etymology and spread 2 Preparation 3 History in the United States 4 Food safety caution 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

Etymology and spread

'Chitterling' is a Middle English word for the small intestines of a pig, especially as they are fried, roasted or stewed for food.^[1] Middle English was the language spoken in England between 1066 and about 1470, and so the food dish has at least a medieval origin in Europe.

As pigs are a common source of meat throughout the world, the dish known as chitterlings can be found in most pork-eating cultures. Chitterlings are popular in most parts of Europe, where pig intestines are also used as casing for sausages. In England, chitterlings remain especially popular in Yorkshire. Thomas Hardy wrote of chitterlings in his novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, when the father of a poor family John Durbeyfield talks of what he would like to eat:

"Tell 'em at home that I should like for supper, - well, lamb's fry [liver] if they can get it; and if they can't, black-pot; and if they can't get that, well, chitterlings will do."

They are eaten as a dish in East Asian cuisines.

In the United States of America, chitterlings are an African-American culinary tradition and a Southern culinary tradition sometimes called "soul food" cooking.

Blacks in the Caribbean and indigenous peoples in Mexico also make use of pork in traditional dishes such as Mondongo and Menudo.

Preparation

Chitterlings are carefully cleaned and rinsed several times before they are boiled or stewed for several hours. A common practice is to place a halved onion in the pot to mitigate what many regard as a pungent, unpleasant odor that can be particularly strong when the chitterlings begin to cook. Chitterlings sometimes are battered and fried after the stewing process and commonly are served with cider vinegar and hot sauce as condiments, accompanied with coleslaw, or greens, and cornbread.

History in the United States

In colonial times, hogs were slaughtered in December. During slavery, in order to maximize profits, slave owners commonly fed their slaves in the cheapest manner possible. At hog butchering time, the preferred cuts of meat were reserved for the master's use, with the remains, such as fatback, snouts, ears, neck bones, feet, and intestines given to the slaves for their consumption.^[2] Wealthier individuals considered pig innards (offal) as inedible and sometimes had them buried as garbage, but enterprising slaves would unearth them under cover of darkness and salvage them for the cook pot.^[3]

April 22, 2003 The Smithsonian Institution's Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture accepted the papers of the Chitlin Market, a local business, as part of its emerging collection of materials about African American celebrations, foods and foodways.^[4]

Food safety caution

Care must be taken when preparing chitterlings, due to the possibility of disease being spread when they have not been cleaned or cooked properly. These diseases/bacteria include E. coli and Yersinia enterocolitica, as well as Salmonella. Chitterlings must be soaked and rinsed thoroughly in several different cycles of cool water, and repeatedly picked clean by hand, removing extra fat, undigested food, and specks of fecal matter because the part of the pig the 'chitlins' come from includes intestinal polyps and the last few inches before the pig's anus. The chitterlings are then boiled and simmered until tender.

See also

• Chitlin' circuit
• Chitterling is a song by Adge Cutler and The Wurzels
• "Chitlins con Carne" is an instrumental jazz blues tune by guitarist Kenny Burrell from the album Midnight Blue (1963) and was also covered by Stevie Ray Vaughan on The Sky Is Crying (1991).
• Gargantua and Pantagruel written in 1532 by the Renaissance author Rabelais describes an adventure of Pantagruel, involving a tribe of Chitterlings in book 4, chapter 35.
• Kishka (food)

References

1. ^ Oxford English Dictionary entry
2. ^ "Fried Chitterlings (Chitlins) and Hog Maws". The Chitterling Site. http://chitterlings.com/chitterling.html. Retrieved on 2007-06-21. 
3. ^ Trescott, Jacqueline (April 25, 2003). "A place of honor for slaves' survival food". Los Angeles Times. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/328370031.html?dids=328370031:328370031&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Apr+25%2C+2003&author=Jacqueline+Trescott&pub=Los+Angeles+Times&edition=&startpage=E.28&desc=ART. Retrieved on 2007-06-21. 
4. ^ Trescott.

External links

• History of Chitterlings by Linda Stradley
• Caution in Preparing Chitterlings from the State of Georgia Division of Public Health
• Loved and reviled, chitterlings are the ultimate in soul food by LaMont Jones for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
• [1] Shauna Anderson's Chitlin Market inducted into Smithsonian's Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History April 22, 2003

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