Happy New Year, one and all!
Everybody has their unique family and cultural traditions that they use to welcome the new year. As with most holidays, many of them involve food. However, the culinary traditions surrounding New Year’s Day aren’t just about familiar, festive food, as they also carry the added dimension of helping deliver the promise of good fortune for the upcoming year.
Here in the South, a few of those gustatory rituals involve the consumption of collard greens, mustard greens, or possibly kale (to represent increased wealth in the next year), a dish called Hoppin’ John, composed of black-eyed peas and rice (to guarantee good luck), and pork (…um, because it tastes good). The range of pork dishes cover every part of the pig from from bacon, to ribs, to chitlins.
“What’s a chitlin?” you might ask. The short answer is pig intestines, cleaned, washed, seasoned and boiled slow and long throughout the day. To be honest, chitlins are an acquired taste. My dad and I eat them, but my brother doesn’t. My mother will prepare them, but she doesn’t eat them. Personally, I enjoy them every now and then. It’s a great seasonal, cold weather side dish. Given the less than savory origins of the chitlin, preparation is key. It’s a labor intensive process and you have to know, and/or trust, the person who is preparing your chitlins, which makes it the Black man’s equivalent of the Japanese puffer fish.
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I suppose, seizing on the perceived popularity of this dish, in the February 1974 edition of the Black interest magazine, Ebony, the fine folks at Kraft decided to make an appeal to the African-American market by encouraging their target demographic to add a little “tang” to their “chit’lins” by serving them with their boxed spaghetti dinners (above). This recipe, and the outreach to the Black community, was well-intentioned, but frightfully wrong-headed, from the very name of the dish, which is rife with misspellings and mysteriously placed apostrophes, to…well, the very notion of combining spaghetti and chitlins. Nonetheless, there it is for your enjoyment. I encourage all you culinary adventurers to give this one a try this holiday season. I know your family will thank you for it.
Finally, speaking of thanks, I’m sure I’ve said this multiple times in the last couple weeks, but it bears repeating: Thank you!
This year, when I started WORLD OF HURT, I mostly did it to prove something to myself, however, I was pleasantly shocked to discover that so many other people have enjoyed it, and recommended it to others. Your support means so much to me, and I can’t thank you enough. This month, I’ll end with nearly ten times the readers I had when I began in April 2009, and that’s absolutely incredible to me.
Please stick around in the coming year, because I hope to have some more action and surprises for you.
- JEP
