BREADSTICKS AND STRICKOLEAN

I learned the truth about kishke at the age of 12. It was at Larry Dellheim’s bar mitzvah. He had always been pretty obnoxious. “You know what you’re eating, don’t you?” he poked. “Cow’s guts.”

It was like hearing about sex for the first time. Just to play it safe, I put down my fork. “Get out of here!”

“Go ask you mom,” Larry jeered.

Years went by, and I’ve finally gone back to kishke. But cow organs – lung, heart, pancreas, brains – still give me the willies.

I was in good company. Northerners don’t eat much slimy innards. Then I moved South and discovered that organ meat was not a delicacy, but a sacrament.

Take, for example, the steaming bowl of pork intestine enhanced with hot-pepper sauce that they call “chitlins.” They look like they have the resilience of uncut rubber bands, but people slobber in them.

Then, I discovered that if you order cooked vegetables in a restaurant, their preparation is not so simple. They are invariably cooked with ham hock. This causes a slithering pool of grease to form atop the bowl and shards of pork to infuse the vegetables. My friends and I used to call it “mystery meat,” but there is no mystery about it.

I finally found it safe to eat lunch at a salad bar, where the vegetables are fresh and clean. At least I thought so. Once at a salad bar I loaded my plate with raw veggies. Well, maybe this isn’t as bad as I thought. They even had a stack of breadsticks, fairly cosmopolitan for the rural South. I bit into one, but it was oddly greasy. “This is not bread,” I said to the man at the next table. “No,” the man answered. “That’s fatback and strick-o-lean.” Well, I knew that fatback was a grubby pork delicacy. But “strick-o-lean”? “It’s a streak of lean bacon,” he explained impatiently.

“Oh.” I wanted to gargle with lye.

Then I came to resolution. I was the one who chose to move South. Besides, what a great story to tell my kids. Surely my two older ones would laugh. But then there’s the one who’s a Lubavitcher . . .