By Tonia Moxley
The Roanoke Times
November 29, 2006
Summary: In defense of the global, yet humble, pork rind
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This column started out funny.
It was to be a dig with padded elbow in the sides of food snobs who scrunch up their faces and make disgusted noises when they hear me talk about the pantry staples of my childhood.
Like country ham (compared to “old socks”), biscuits and sausage gravy (”greasy and gross”), Vienna sausages (”nasty”) and the subject of this piece, pork rinds (”eww!”).
In Southwest Virginia, pork rinds are indigenous and more accurately referred to as pig skins or meat skins.
Roddy Moore, director of the Blue Ridge Institute at Ferrum College, remembers eating pork rinds his mother made by first frying and then baking the skin and attached fat of the family pig.
“They weren’t as crispy,” Moore said. “They were more substantial.”
For more than 20 years, fresh fried pork rinds have been a popular draw at the Ferrum Folk Life Festival. But pork rinds have a place in other cultures, too.
Many a pint of good English bitter is drunk while munching pig scratchings in the local pub.
Filipinos like to eat a version of them with fiery vinegar sauce. In Mexico, they snack on chicharrones dipped in hot sauce or eat them cooked in stews. Hispanic immigrants are pushing up sales of rinds in the U.S., too.
Nearly every bag found in grocery stores or gas stations is double-labeled “pork rinds” and “chicharrones.” At La Fabulosa Mexican grocery store in Blacksburg, they sell imported pork rinds as big as your hand.
In fact, versions of the humble rind exist in every pig-eating culture in the world. They come dusted with barbecue, chili and lime, salt and vinegar. You can even get them dipped in chocolate. Just type “pork chocs” into your Internet search engine.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when high-fat, low-carb diets were horrifying American public health officials and worrying potato chip and pretzel manufacturers, flavored rinds enjoyed great sales.
While sales are down from the boom Atkins diet years, in 2005 fans still crunched through about $562 million worth of pork rinds, according to the Arlington-based Snack Food Association.
As quirky as these facts are, it still didn’t get to why I love them. What pork rinds mean to me — that’s the story I had wanted to write.
And while fretting about this late one night, I remembered.
Most summers when grade school was out, I rose before dawn to help my popaw build houses.
We’d ride to the work site sitting quietly together on the brown vinyl seat of his pickup, always with a bag of pork rinds and a lunch pail between us.
All morning he’d let me work up an appetite with him.
I mixed sand and water into cement when we laid brick. I strapped on an oversized nail apron and purpled my thumb hammering in shingles.
There were few things he kept me from trying. And more things he dared me to do.
I didn’t like it when he left me up on a scaffolding because I was too scared of heights to climb down.
But he told me I was smart enough to be the first woman president. And he’d vote for me, too. As long as I was a Democrat.
We would have these talks sitting on the tailgate at noon. That’s when we shared cool water from his old red-and-silver Coleman jug and ate cheese and lettuce sandwiches warmed by morning sun.
We’d dip into the bag of pork rinds and laugh at how loud they crunched.
Eating them now is like grieving. I take a bite, and the memories dissolve like fat on the tongue.
Copyright The Roanoke Times 2006
Tags: cooking, Pork rinds, snack foods