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News Paper Articles about the Chitlin Strut

USA TODAY November 28, 1997
Deirdre R. Schwiesow

SALLEY, S.C.: Hog and pig intestines will be celebrated Saturday at the 32nd annual Chitlin' Strut in this town 25 miles southwest of Columbia. Sen. Strom Thurmond, a regular at the festival, will be grand marshal of this year's Chitlin' Strut parade, just one of the day's highlights. There are also a pancake breakfast, hog-calling and dance contests, carnival rides, arts and crafts and, of course, chitterlings dinners (plus options for the intestinally timid). An evening of country and Western dancing ends the festivities. Information, 803-258-3485.

The New York Times October 20, 1996
Swine Time

Thirty-one years ago, tiny Salley, S.C., found itself in a pinch: Christmas was coming and there was no money for decorations. Solution? Chitlin' Strut, a festival held right after Thanksgiving, honoring the dish made from minced hog intestines. Besides feeding 60,000 visitors with 10,000 pounds of guts, the event raises $25,000 for civic coffers. "The Strut is definitely the most important thing in town," says Peggy Yon, Salley's treasurer. "Without it, we'd probably fold."

The New York Times November 28, 1983
Feast Day for Salley, S.C.

The hearty of spirit and stomach packed this town of 580 people for the annual ''Chitlin Strut,'' eating, hog-calling, foot-stomping and strutting. About 44,000 people turned out Saturday for a celebration of the Southern delicacy known as chitterlings, or ''chitlins'' - hog intestines boiled, battered, cut into strips, fried and eaten. They ate 20,000 pounds of them.

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution December 10, 1995


Hog wild for CHITLINS Sniffing an opportunity, S.C. town struts its stuff in honor of the lowly edible innards
Jim Auchmutey

With her black suit, blond hair and silver tiara, Jimmy-Lynne Smith looked as out of place at the 30th annual Chitlin Strut as a pig at a prom. But she was here for good reason. The Orangeburg teenager had just been crowned Miss Chitlin, and her public was curious: Given the honor, did she feel morally obligated to eat breaded and fried hog guts?

"It is not in my contract," she answered, nose crinkled, as she leaned against a propane gas tank. "Smelling them is enough."

So it goes for the lowly chitterling. Even the Chitlin Queen turns up her snout. Come to think of it, snout might have been part of her lunch a she ate a corndog instead of chitlins.

No Southern food makes people as squeamish as the fried or boiled small intestines of hogs. Like Confederate flags, chitlins divide the region into profoundly and viscerally opposed camps. You either do entrails or you don't a there's no compromise.

Why chitlins should pose such a dilemma puzzles some food experts. As Atlanta chef Tim Patridge points out, other cultures have long consumed tripe without assigning it the unsavory image it suffers in America, where it's associated with poor people. He remembers working with a French chef in Midtown who pulled him aside and asked, "Do you know where I can find peeeg intestines?"

That'd be Salley.

Salley, a no-stoplight town of 451 between Augusta and Columbia, became the self-proclaimed chitlin capital of the world in 1966, when the mayor decided that Main Street needed new Christmas lights. A country music DJ suggested raising the money at a chitlin festival for no other reason than that he thought it'd be good for a few heehaws. The strut was born.

This year's edition began like the others, with a parade on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. It was a chill, cloudy morning a you might say the fog came in on little pig feet a as 10,000 visitors poured into town to watch the ragtag procession of cops, clowns and Shriners that tootled past the Salley Factory Outlet ("Chitlin Strut Special a $ 6 Pants"). On one float, four women dangled chitlins in their pale, uncooked state, like ghouls at an autopsy. They were fittingly followed by the shiny red truck of Sharpe's Septic Tank Service.

Festivities under way, the crowd drifted toward the community center, an old high school renovated with chitlin money, and formed long lines to buy $ 6 tickets for plates of you-know-what. It was easy to tell the first-timers; they were the ones who lost color when the wind shifted and the stench of frying chitlins descended on the grounds.

"I hope it tastes better than it smells," said chitlin virgin Sarah Shearn, a retiree who came down with a busload of tourists from the Raleigh-Durham area.

Some popped the Styrofoam lunch containers eagerly and dove in. Others opened gingerly, peeking inside like the tangle of golden-fried innards might spring to life like a jack-in-a-box.

The less adventuresome wandered past a dozen food tents, where Jamaican, Japanese and other foreign cuisines suddenly looked inviting.

One onlooker who did none of the above was Sen. Strom Thurmond, who worked his way through the throng steadying himself with one hand grip after another. "I'm not much for chitlins," the old pol said, "but I do like to watch folks eat 'em."

Later that afternoon, an audience gathered behind the school for the day's titular event a the chitlin strut a a dance contest in which people clog, moonwalk and generally twist and shoat to show how happy chitlins make them feel. A fast-footed hoofer from Buffalo, S.C., won, but the sentimental favorite was "Fat Baby" Worthy, a bearded fellow who performed a graceful funky chicken despite the awesome load of chitlins overhanging his belt.

Watching all the dancing must have worked up appetites, because not long after the contest, the chow line started growing again. Inside the kitchen, volunteers braided and floured 3,500 pounds of chitlins, all of which had been cleaned, boiled and shipped frozen from the Smithfield ham company in Virginia.

"The tough part comes tomorrow," said 29-year-old Tony Taylor as he stood over a deep-fryer and plunged another basket into the gurgling peanut oil. "That's when I try to get this smell out of my clothes."

The New York Times December 3, 1980
Rebecca Roberts
SALLEY, S.C. A TOWN THANKFUL FOR CHITLINS

The sun shone last Saturday and the wind near and far and drawing some 40,000 people to the 15th annual Chitlin Strut in Salley, S.C. During the Thanksgiving Day holidays, Salley's 500 residents stage a three-day festival that includes a talent show, beauty pageant and parade, culminating this year in the cooking, and consuming, of 8,000 pounds of chitlins - short for chitterlings or hog intestines.

''Some, now, don't care for the smell,'' sai d Mayor Jack Able, ''but to the people of Salley, it's like perfume. Chitlins have done a lot for thi s town.'' Indeed, Salley is the self-proclaimed chitlin capital of th e world.

Proceeds from other struts have prevented any rise in the town's tax rate since 1966 and have financed municipal projects such as trash cans, a garbage truck and a fire truck. This year's projected $15,000 will help renovate the ailing Crescent City Vocational School into a community center.

A Columbia, S.C., disk jockey, Ben Dekle, came up with the idea of a strut in 1966 as a means for raising money for the town's Christmas decorations, and Mayor Able persuaded the City Council to accept it. A life-long resident of Salley and owner of the town grocery store, Mayor Able said he understood ''folks being a little apprehensive at first, but by the third year they were all for it and now they volunteer, and people just keep comin' and comin.''' Some come for the food, others for the festivities.

''The smell is not what fills your stomach, it's the eating,'' said Mike Ragan of Columbia, who'd waited an hour in line for a $4.50 plate of fried chitlins. ''I like it fine and can almost taste them. They're sort of like bacon or pork rinds.''

''Yeah,'' agreed Ira Sanders, also of Columbia, ''it tastes like bacon, but it's sure got a smell of its own.'' And that smell drew more than 8,000 people to the large brick building in which Marvin Widener and his crew were preparing chitlins Saturday morning to night.

Geneva Benjamin and two other women were standing at a table where they dusted half-frozen mounds of intestines with flour and seasonings, separating them into strips and spreading them evenly on large wire trays. Other hands then immersed the trays into vats of hot peanut oil, where the chitlins bubbled into crispness in about 12 minutes. They were then drained, bagged and eaten.

''We want people to be satisfied,'' said Mr. Widener as he stirred a boiling batch of chitlins. ''I think we do a good job and I look forward to doing this, and so do others.''

There's a ''closeness among residents,'' he says, that has kept him in the town since he married a Salley girl, moved from nearby Wagener and opened a garage here in 1956.

He laughed, rubbed his hands together, and continued: ''People seem to really enjoy these chitlins. I don't say I don't like them, because they've done a lot for me, and for Salley, but I sure don't eat them.''

Flouring and frying are the final stages of preparation - boiling chitlins into tenderness is an all-day affair that has become an annual event for Terry McMillan. For the past 12 Thanksgivings he has assembled friends and family on his father's farm in rural Bamberg County to boil buckets of already cleaned chitlins, cut them into strips, and pack them in ice until Saturday, ''so they'll be fresh, not soggy.'' Early Thursday morning, teen-agers from the nearby Colston Baptist Church were stoking the fires under the four 400-gallon syrup bins in the barnyard, sometimes stirring the simmering chitlins with pitchforks or boat paddles.

''We add onions to kill the scent,'' said Mr. McMillan with a laugh. ''I don't eat them, but Mama or Aunt Nell or Jim Thomas, who's about a professional taster, tells us when they're done.'' This is usually after five or six hours of cooking. Normally employed as a school superintendent, Mr. McMillan plays chef for a day, he said ''because I enjoy helping Salley raise money.''

Besides chitlins, strut devotees sampled foods from the various concession booths lining the main street, or ventured into the school, where the Salley Garden Club was selling homemade baked goods like funnel cakes and cornbread.

''Part of our money will go for the cemetery, part for the school,'' said the club president, Nancy Salley. She came to Salley to teach school, married one of the many descendants of the town's founder, Capt. William Salley, and never left. ''Most of us are related somehow,'' she said.

In another school room, people were buying T-shirts, jerseys and caps lettered with ''Chitlin Fever'' and ''I've got the guts to strut.''

Some donned their souvenirs and then headed toward the stage where Bill Williams and the Playboys were churning out country western tunes most of the day. Their rendition of ''Chitlin Fever'' propelled 81-year-old Mamie Freeman onto the stage and into a high-stepping strut.

''The music just moved me,'' she laughed, adding that she had come about 90 miles from Abbeville for her first strut and that she wasn't disappointed.

Late in the afternoon the hog calling contestants grunted, snorted and squealed noises ''that would scare the oink right out of any pig,'' said one listener.

''I loved i t,'' said Frances Karraker of Oak Ridge, Tenn. ''I couldn't beli eve those sounds were human.'' The crowd cheered as Ada Hall, a grandmother from Union, S.C., bellowed her way to the championship, ''by hollering as loud as I could,'' she said.

At the end of the celebration, the registration book was filled with names of visitors from as far away as Michigan and Canada and the strut attendants were filled with more than four tons of chitlins.

''You couldn't have asked for a nicer day or a better strut,'' said Mayor Able. ''How are we gonna top it next year?''

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