Tripe. We have a family history that has tripe in it.
My mom ate strange things. When we were kids, my mother used to eat pickled pig’s feet. I can safely say that was the singularly most disgusting thing a kid can watch an adult eat.
Crabs and lobster are one thing, but watching your mother pull apart some vaguely humanly articulated looking pink things and gnawing the cartilage off of them and crunching it was unsettling, to say the least.
I have always suspected that she took a liking to them because she knew we wouldn’t filch them and eat them, a lesson my dad never seemed to learn when he bought his snacks.
My mom was a great cook, but her endeavors sometimes extended past the edge of what we as kids were capable of accepting.
One evening for dinner, we were all sitting around the table, and she bought out this great big Blue Danube soup tureen and set it in the middle of the table. I remember wondering what it was, and leaning over to peer inquisitively into the steaming interior.
Inside was red sauce, unnaturally bright red against the white china interior, with...some kind of strips of white things in it. Some of them, as they broke the surface were smooth and white, but some of them had a bizarre textured or honeycombed appearance to them!
When we asked what it was, my mother said: “Tripe! It’s good. Eat it.”
No way. As far as I was concerned, it looked like some poor alien from outer space had been stripped of his flesh to feed us. None of us would touch it, including my dad, and boy, was my mom ever pissed...:)
I did have trouble with cow tongue unless it was chopped up for a sandwich. The whole thing lying on a plate was off putting.
Odd, so did I. I once had an ex-father-in-law that would eat those things along with pickled boiled eggs. His flatulence would flat run you out of the house! After the wedding he was never invited to our place. Which wasn’t much of a problem as the marriage only lasted 16 months.
Now my mountain granny considered freshly butchered pig brains an absolute delicacy! She would purchase two young shoats in early Spring and feed them out until it got cold enough in the fall to butcher them. She used as much of each pig as she could. We used to say Granny used every part of a pig but it’s tail and it’s oink! But it’s all she knew. Trust me, you’ve never turned so ‘green around the gills’ as when you’ve walked into yer grandma’s kitchen and discovered a wad of bloody pig brains lying in a cereal bowl! She loved to mix them into scrambled eggs and feast on them. I don’t recall her ever eating chitlins but she lived thru both World Wars so it would not surprise me. She hand-milked 3 cows twice a day, hand-churned her own buttermilk and butter, raised an acre garden, and raised 9 kids-all on a working cattle farm-practically by her self until she couldn’t do it any longer. I could probably write a book about her. She was indeed, one of a kind and I miss her terribly...
Pickled pigs feet were my father and brother’s Saturday lunch deal. Grossest crap I ever heard being eaten or smelled.
I shudder thinking about it.