Chitlin Chitlin Bang Bang

I am not an adventurous man. The closest I want to come to hiking through jungles and traipsing across deserts is watching National Geographic documentaries in my underpants. And rest assured, all you visually-minded readers, that is a common occurrence. But I am an adventurous eater. I love new restaurants and cuisines. I’m fascinated by new cultures, but I don’t want to necessarily visit these places. I do, however, want to stick my face in all of their delicacies and then make condescending remarks about how superior American tastes are.

So it’s a shame that up until this weekend I had never tried one of the most defining dishes of the Heart of Dixie. Sure, I’ve ground my gums on grits. I’ve processed plates of pecan pie. I’ve masticated the most magnificent morsels of buttermilk cornbread muffins. But I had never eaten chitterlings.

Pronounced “chit-lins” by people who don’t want to sound like stereotypical white people, chitterlings were a staple of Southern soul food, particularly among the African-American population. They are less common today, but still served in some communities. Oh, and if you don’t know what chitterlings are, they are pig bowels. You know, like, colons. The parts of animals whose job it is to house and then evacuate poop.

Eating chitterlings has been a goal – nay, a dream – of mine ever since I was a bag boy at Johnson’s Giant Food in high school.

 Making immature people giggle since 1967

We sold all kinds of odd animal parts. Pig ears, pig knees, pork rinds, pig feet, pig intestines, a mysterious pork-based product called “souse”. Basically, if it was deemed inedible by modern society, I bagged hundreds of them.

 “Here’s your pig, ma’am. Some assembly required.”

I couldn’t convince Mom to cook these things, however. So when a friend, Amanda, found out about my desire to eat chitterlings she told her father. Mr. Bray had grown up eating chitterlings and knew how to prepare them, so he graciously offered to cook them for me.

Here’s where I need to expound on the cooking process. You can’t just put chitterlings in the microwave like they’re a frozen burrito. No sir. You’ve got to carefully prepare them OR YOU WILL DIE OF YERSINIOSIS.  Ok, you won’t die but you will have to change your permanent mailing address to Your Bathroom c/o Irritable Bowels. This preparation process involves ridding the chitterlings of leftover excrement, because the pig probably didn’t do a 24-hour Hollywood cleanse the day before he was slaughtered so you could more fully enjoying devouring his intestines. He probably ate extra slop that day as a final show of defiance. Anyway, I didn’t watch Mr. Bray do this, but I imagine you clean the chitterlings by angrily strangling them until they have taken their last breath, but instead of breath it’s poop.

“Why you little!...Yersiniosis!”

And then when the chitterlings are sufficiently clean, you have to boil them three separate times. As you might guess, this can be a smelly process. Mr. Bray told me of a chitterling festival in South Carolina that had odor complaints from towns several miles away. I'm pretty sure the festival sent dank clouds of poop fumes and bacteria to ruin their neighbor's water supplies and was the source material for Erin Brockovich. 

I picked the chitterlings up from the Bray's, thanked them for their generosity, and then headed to my parents’ house to try them out. I leaned close and took a whiff. It had a faint, yet perceptible bouquet, not unlike a child’s diaper downwind on a clear day. They weren’t the most appetizing thing to look at, either. A pile of sinewy tubes and tissue. 

Maybe if I pour in some milk and sprinkle some sugar...

Some people prepare them fried and covered in hot sauce, but Mr. Bray left them mostly unseasoned to let me taste the “natural chitterling flavor”. Excited and nauseous, I dug my fork into the most appealing bit I could find and held it to my mouth. Mom couldn’t watch. The flavor was surprisingly subtle, but gained momentum as I chewed. I ate about three more pieces before calling it quits. I was happy to finally have the opportunity to eat this notorious delicacy, but I have to admit - it kind of tastes like the inside of a pig’s anus.

I do not say that to be crude. I say it because that is technically what I was eating, and that is technically what it tastes like. How would you describe the taste of strawberries to someone who has never had one before? “They taste like…strawberries!” Well, if you really want to know for yourself what true chitterlings taste like, I invite you to try them. As for me, I have fulfilled my dream of eating pig colon. On to the next dream…

 Whale chitlins!

Special thanks to Amanda Cody and Mr. and Mrs. Bray for helping a young man put a check mark on his pathetically unadventurous bucket list!