Chitlins and Rutabagas

Good ole pig guts! That’s what chitlins are. I think the proper name is chitterlings, but for those of us who grew up in the rural South, they are chitlins. I think the origin of chitlins was rooted in one of the small farmer’s values: use everything you have.

I did not fully understand this value until I lived in West Africa. When we shared a meal with a villager’s family and they prepared a chicken, our boys’ eyes would roll back into their heads when they saw the villagers eating every part of the chicken except the beak and the claws. That included the bones as they would crack them with their teeth and suck the marrow out of the bones. And the gristle—it was just crunchy chicken meat.

Cooking the intestines of the pig takes a certain culinary prowess as they must be carefully washed and cooked to make them safe for consumption. In the early winter each year my uncles would kill hogs and it was all hands on deck.  It was an exciting time as I watched the process as a child. Big black iron pots of boiling water were prepared to help remove the dirt and hair from the pig skin. I won’t bore the reader with a gross description of the next steps, but it included the removal of the intestines and cleaning them with boiling water.

My family was not fond of chitlins—except my younger brother, Bubba. When Bubba was only two years old, he developed a taste for chitlins. Our neighbor, Beatrice, started feeding chitlins to Bubba as a joke, but to everyone’s surprise Bubba really liked them. Beatrice kept Bubba while I was at school, and some days when I was walking home from school, the aroma of chitlins filled the air long before I arrived at home. The smell of them cooking is pungent. I was never able to eat them because they had to pass under my nose, and I just could not get them down. Actually, the smell is worse when they are boiling. After they are boiled, they are rolled in flour, salt and pepper and other seasonings and then deep fried.

After we started living overseas, I learned that us rural southerners were not so crude after all as the French consider andouille sausages a delicacy. And the Scots rave about their haggis. By any other name both of those delicacies are still chitlins!

Another southern food that stinks while cooking is rutabagas. They stunk so bad that my mother would never cook them for my dad, although he loved eating them. Cheryl’s grandmother learned that Pete liked rutabagas, and since she loved to please people she enjoyed cooking rutabagas for Pete. I asked Mamoo one time if she liked rutabagas, and she said no and she hated to smell them cooking. So, I asked her why she cooked them for Pete, and she said simply “I like to do things for people I love.”

As I write this blog post on Saturday afternoon, I am multi-tasking and watching college football games. When I finish this epistle, I am going to abandon my football games and take my grandson, Pete, to get a cookies and cream milkshake. No one asked me to take him; I am not taking him to get a milkshake because I feel that I need to do it; I am just taking him because I like to do things for people I love.

Why not do something for someone just because you like to do things for people you love?