THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, January 2, 1995 TAG: 9501020041
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
It fell to my lot this season to join 250 men who gather annually in Richmond at the so-called Colon Club to eat chitterlings for breakfast.
After that, the day cannot but improve.
Maybe a fifth of the company actually eats them. The majority, which has country ham and eggs, feigns to taste the chitterlings while marveling at the intrepid minority consuming them.
It is an acquired taste, one formed in childhood while admiring the example of one's elders. As Virginia becomes steadily more urbanized, the population of chitterling eaters diminishes.
It is the only male stronghold left in which women have absolutely no interest in entering. Many men who partake, gingerly, of chitterlings do so from sheer bravado.
Throughout the day, every now and then they square their shoulders and mention they had chitterlings for breakfast. Their companions look at them in disbelief.
Of chitterlings being boiled, writhing in a big black cauldron, someone once said it was the only time he had seen flies trying to get out of the house.
Chitterlings - or chitlings, as they are pronounced - ought to be cooked outdoors, as they used to be during hog killings in the winter.
In the cooking, the hog's large or small intestines are turned inside out, washed, then parboiled for hours (the longer, the better), then fried in deep fat, sometimes in batter, sometimes not.
Outdoors, one can, as long as the chitterlings are cooking downwind, breathe and, in a spirit of being liberated, look around and exult that when it comes to eating chitterlings one is an arrant coward.
The feasts, or lingering ordeals, began 59 years ago when a circle of friends rallied around Gov. William M. Tuck and ate chitterlings with him in the cafeteria of the Larus Tobacco Co.
In the main ballroom of the Commonwealth Club, the speaker this year labored, poor fellow, but said little that could distract the audience from the menu.
In the waning days of his hectic term of office, Gov. J. Lindsay Almond Jr. delivered what remains the most memorable line at the annual breakfasts.
Looking down at his successor, Gov. Harrison, who had no chitterlings on his platter, Almond intoned:
``Albertis, one thing you must learn as governor of Virginia. You must learn to eat chitterlings, you must learn to partake of them with relish, you must devour them voraciously to prepare for the trials ahead, because during the coming four years of your administration, you will be called upon to eat a great many things far worse than unexpurgated hog guts!''
The next most celebrated observation came from Gov. Mills E. Godwin. Invited into the club in 1965, he was told he would have to eat chitterlings or not join.
``Then I'll pull out,'' he said. by CNB