Behind a storefront in Hyattsville, eight women work feverishly into the night, their fingers flying as they quickly pick and clean membranes and extract what one calls "the gunk" from soaked small intestines of pigs.
Chitlins. Yesterday, a bittersweet reminder of slavery and of growing up poor in the South. Today, a delicacy in great demand.
In such great demand, in fact, that Chitlin Market and Co., founded in September 1995 by former IRS statistician Shauna Anderson, has turned into a $300,000-to-$500,000-a-year business that employs two shifts of pickers, 16 in all, including three men.
Much of the ordering and delivery is done online, with overnight delivery by Federal Express.
"One day we're gonna have a chitlin festival. We're gonna invite the whole country, so I hope Hyattsville is ready for the influx of people," Anderson says.
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Her product is sought after and now has a national following.
"Once you eat chitlins, you never forget them," said J. Anthony Brown, co-host of the Tom Joyner syndicated radio show, which recently did a program on chitlins.
During slavery, he said, "when they killed a hog, we kept what was thrown out and made a meal of it."
For now, Anderson, 44, a single mother who also home-schools her 6-year-old daughter, is scrambling to keep up with a demand she says she can barely meet--a monthly average of 10,000 pounds of chitlins picked, rinsed and sold.
Not merely chitlins, but "gourmet fully cleaned chitterlings . . . ready to cook," which eliminates the time-consuming and messy part--the picking--that many chitlin-lovers are happy to forgo. "A job no family wants to tackle," Anderson says in her promotional material.
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This is soul-food nostalgia--the sanitized version.
"Delicately hand-cleaned, shipped directly to your home," says Anderson's Web page.
It's something that customers are willing to pay a premium price for, $4.99 a pound (fresh, with a five-pound minimum), at her Hyattsville store. That is three or four times what uncleaned chitterlings cost--and Anderson bumps the price even more if the product is shipped.
She'll also cook the chitlins, five pounds (weight before cooking) for $32.45.
"We do the hard work," she says, "and leave the warmth for the customers."
Anderson said she was "looking for something small to supplement my income" when she first opened her business in Mount Rainier. But business was so good that eight months after opening her doors, she had to hire more cleaners and relocate to her current larger space, at 3014 Hamilton St., between a hair "Klinik" and a pawn shop in an old Hyattsville shopping strip.
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Along with pig guts comes a particular odor, but for chitlin-lovers, Anderson says, it's just fine. What does her establishment smell like? "I'm not the right person to ask because I've become accustomed to it," she said. "To a chitlin lover, it's like heaven."
Since Anderson took her business online, designing her own Web site (www.chitlinmarket.com), 40 percent of her business has come from all across the country. She has been featured in Jet and Emerge magazines, written up in the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Detroit News and appeared in a Newsweek column about electronic commerce.
In addition, she regularly receives calls from people who want to establish Chitlin Market franchises in such far-flung places as Detroit, North Carolina, Indianapolis and Olympia, Wash. One caller wanted to know if she planned to go public and sell shares on the New York Stock Exchange.
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"I still have to pinch myself," she says. "All these wonderful things and how do you manage it?"
One idea Anderson has is to try to find a partner. The other is to sell the business.
Callers to her toll-free number (1-800-933-CHIT) now can push option 5 to learn how to become an investor in her business, with a minimum of $50,000 to buy into it. She said she's had "about eight to 10 people contact me for a partnership. Nobody has offered to buy the business outright."
In addition to walk-in customers from Prince George's and the area, the business has attracted others who drive from as far as Richmond and Philadelphia and national celebrities such as Brown. Making what he thought was an on-air joke on the Joyner show, Brown proposed a chitlin mail-order business. A caller told him there really was such a business, in Hyattsville. One thing led to another, and last summer Brown flew in from Los Angeles to spend a day hanging out at the market. He flew back with two 10-pound buckets of chitlins.
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Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) is another fan. "I suspect she'll be a major company on the stock exchange if she ever goes public," he said.
"This past Thanksgiving, I was in a crunch to find out where I could find some ready to cook chitlins up to my cleaning standards. A friend told me about this place on the Internet. The next day, they delivered 65 pounds of uncooked chitlins to my front door in Washington.
"'I'm a proud conoisseur of chitlins. I've been eating them all my life. If they come clean, the labor's gone. There's nothing left but the love."
Nostalgia aside, chitterlings, once cleaned, are simmered with onions, celery, vinegar, salt and pepper until tender. They are then battered and fried, used as sausage casing or added to soups. In France and in Cajun Louisiana, they are the essence of andouille, a country sausage often used in jambalaya and gumbo or served with red beans and rice.
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In African American families, usually grandmothers spent hours at the sink cleaning and rinsing the pig intestines in preparation, especially for holiday meals, a tradition that makes Christmas time for the Chitlin Market like tax season for an accountant: relentlessly busy.
Margaret McCombs, 50, one of Anderson's employees, said she can clean two 10-pound buckets full of chitlins in 30 minutes. She learned it from watching her grandmother and mother back in North Carolina. "I've been cleaning chitlins ever since I was 12 years," McCombs said. Nearly a year ago, when she saw Anderson's help-wanted ad in the newspaper, she said, "I couldn't believe it. I said, 'I think this is something I can do . . . '
"The trick is to clean it really good, pull all the membranes off, where all the gunk is located--we call it gunk, but you know what I'm talking about," she said. "Once you been cleaning them all the time, you kind of lose your appetite for them. But once those special occasions come around, you get a taste for them again." CAPTION: Margaret McCombs cleans the "gunk" out of chitlins before they get cooked or sent out to customers across the country. ec CAPTION: Owner Shauna Anderson, left, fills a container for Deborah McDow, an employee. ec
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