Frazz by Jef Mallett for November 25, 2020

I’ve tried chitterlings once. Never ever ever again.

I had always known of this food as “chitlin’s” and only from reading. Finally, Mallett got me to actually look it up. Wow.

I stopped eating chitlins once I found out what they were. I was 9-10 at the time, at my grandparents house one evening when I got curious as to what part of what animal I was dining on. I asked my older brother; he didn’t know either, and didn’t care anyway. I went to ask my grandmother, who was in the kitchen. She was always in the kitchen, cooking more food or washing more dishes; I don’t recall her ever sitting down to eat with us during meals whenever we visited. She had a knowing smile on her face when she suggested that I look it up in the dictionary. She and my mother always encouraged me and my brothers to find the answers for ourselves as much as we can. I did. ‘Ch-i-t, chitlins. See: chitterlings. Okay… WHAT? Ugh!’ I had a similar experience with scrapple, although I still get a taste for it about every five years.

As God is my witness, I will never eat another chitterling!

COME ON GUYS!! Chittlings (that’s how it is pronounced in NC) go down pretty good with a cold beer!

In Germany we call them Kutteln and make them solely out of cattle. They are kind of a national cuisine here in southwest Germany. They are served with a redwine sauce and roasted poratoes.

You just knew that Frazz’s Thanksgiving celebration would be an especially long solo run, right? That’s the morally superior way of celebrating a feast day!

To our northern friends , that’s chittlins, and Frazz can have my share.

Ha! I knew there was some offal in American cuisine!

Although I knew that was their correct name, I have never heard them called anything but “chitlins” in my whole life.

American Haggis???

Sounds like a load of tripe to me

Chit: a disrespectful young woman.

Chitterling: a disrespectful teenage girl.

Eating chitterlings: 5 to 10 years in the state prison and a child sex offender registry.

That’s great! Trust—in his own weird style—Caulfield.(Wonder what his parents are like: pretty impressive to have survived eight years or so of Caulfield. And their Poodle. . . )

As a child, my mother and grandmother, who were from North Carolina originally, cooked chitlins once a year for Thanksgiving. They smelled so bad being cleaned and cooked that we changed the “c” to an “s”. Once fully cooked they were edible with vinegar and hot sauce, but nothing that I miss.

Nope. No organ meats and nothing from the digestive tract no matter how well cleaned or prepared.

So like haggis but a bit lower?

As a kid I’d spend all day outside to avoid the smell of them being cleaned and cooked. It’s disgusting. Those in my family that don’t eat them make sure they are placed far away from the other food at dinner time. No one wants to have the fork used to serve them co-mingled with the other food.

I think chitlins are rather like menudo, the traditional Mexican tripe soup—something that’s best purchased as is from. Many seemingly simple things (like saltine crackers) are really pretty difficult to make in an ordinary kitchen, and/or not worth the trouble or the mess.

Anyone who would actually cook and eat chitterlings would call them chitlins.

Please come in, potentially contagious janitor from our son’s school. First, we’ll check your temperature, and then you’ll take a shower, because you smell sweaty as hell. Wait—what am saying? Get lost, weirdo.

LOL, for the longest time, I thought chitterlings and chitlin’s were two different things. My dumb a**s.

Are Chitterlings some sort of Haggis? Pig bowels are used and it’s staple food of poor people.

There was an article in the LA Times a while back about a “food sleuth”—he could guess things about your family based on your answer to “What do you eat for Thanksgiving dinner?”

My cousin loved them until she found out what they were made from. My uncle (not her dad) had a little grocery store in Elizabeth City, NC and cooked them in the back. I could never get past the smell to try them.

Jef Mallett’s Blog Posts

Frazz16 hrs · Butterworth Hospital School of Nursing, early ‘80s, in the midst of a unit on cultural awareness. The week’s focus: food. Food and culture go hand in hand, and so do food and healing. Class was going to be a buffet of sorts. Our diverse faculty would be feeding us from their own various cultures. And we would be having chitterlings. I was a lily-white hayseed, and I had heard about chitlins, and I had a rough idea what they were, and I was sore afraid.

Oh, God, were they good.

That is all.

Never had them.

Here in Mexico Tripas or tripas (intestines) are quite common, deeply fried and served in tacos. Where I live, in Nuevo León, and maybe just in my neck of the woods, the Citrus Region, we have a dish called Longaniza, made with bovine trimmings, lungs, heart, sometimes liver, and blood, seasoned with garlic, black pepper, cumin, oregano and spearmint, and ideally boiled inside a cows big tripe. It is usually sold by the same people that sells Barbacoa. I think it is very much like hagis, but with beef. Anywhere else, longaniza is a kind of red sausage similar to chorizo. Further north, in Coahuila, they boil the cow’s liver, lungs, heart and kidneys and then make a stew with them, called Patagorria, very much like the dish called Sonofagun (name can vary a little) in Texas.

BARF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!