New Year's Mean's Chitlin's
Halifax, Virginia circa 1939, Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Traditionally rural folk have slaughtered hogs around Christmas time using the cold winter weather as a natural refrigerator. Slaughtering hogs can best be described as a highly skilled labor-intensive process. As a result in most rural societies hog killing became a community event in which neighbors killed and butchered six or many more hogs at one time. Responsibilities were divided up with some making crackling, sausage, chops, preparing choice cuts for curing and smoking hams, all the way down to cleaning the intestines for chitlin’s on New Year’s Day. Hog killing continued as a collective community event, and often an integrated one until affordable refrigeration technology became widespread and available. My father remembered as child how his grandfather Washington Opie would butcher and prep hogs for his farm in Virginia as well as box and ship a whole butchered and salted hog to my father’s family in Sleepy Hollow, New York.
