Every part but the squeal?

Madison.

I came to an unusual realization this weekend, which is this: pig intestines have a very distinct smell. I can't be sure of this, but I'd venture a guess that it's a unique odor. How such a realization came to me is this:

Rewind back to April of last year. I'm in New York City for a dreadfully painful convention for work. I'm there earlier than most conventioners for some seminars, along with a coworker who grew up just outside the city. She's a vegetarian, and has a hankering for some good Asian food, so we take a walk down to Chinatown. Though it's been a few years, she's able to guide us to one of her favorite Vietnamese places.

The menu's probably the thickest I've ever seen at a place like this, like your typical New Jersey diner menu filled with both the usual plain American-style Asian food and bizarre Asian delicacies. Maureen, my dinner companion, needs little to no time to decide, in part because she can ignore the eighty percent of the menu that contains meat. I, on the other hand, have decided to order the most unusual thing I can find. Between a shark fin dish for two, deep-fried duck's feet, and other not-available-in-Wisconsin fare, it's a difficult choice. Eventually, I settle on the pork tripe with sour cabbage from the "Chef's Specials" section. The waiter gives me an odd look, and I'm not sure if it's because of my order or because that's just the way he is.

When the meals arrive, I've got a massive plate - enough to feed two people, easily - piled with pickled cabbage and little oval donuts of pig. Immediately, I can tell it's not tripe. I'm still not sure if pigs have tripe. (Beef tripe is the fatty lining of a cow's stomach.) This, clearly, is intestine. Vietnamese chitterlings. And they smell like nothing I've ever smelled before.

This is not to say it's an unpleasant smell. I kind of like it, and the taste is decidedly less funky. I managed to eat about three-quarters of the plate before I couldn't have any more, and would have taken the leftovers with me if I'd had any place to store them.

Fast forward to late January. I've decided to make sausages, and my kit of parts has arrived in the mail. The first sausages are to be a simple affair, packed into hog casings. I open up the bag of casings, and can immediately tell that I've smelled that before. But I can't place it, and later can only remember that I liked the aroma in that bag.

Fast forward again to this past weekend. It's sausage time again. When I open up the bag of casings again, it finally dawns on me. That's the same smell from that Chinatown restaurant. The casings - which are just the thin membrane lining the intestines - smell just like that dish. Then, when I do the same with a bag of sheep casings, I don't get the same smell. Or much of any smell, actually.

When the sausages are finished, any smell of the casing has long since gone. I'd be intrigued to try eating "pork tripe" again, but can't bring myself to buy one of those two-gallon tubs of chitterlings from the monster grocery store. I can't eat all of that. I can't store all of that. And I certainly can't convince anyone else to help me out.

Well, I can think of one person, but he's not flying out here from Atlanta just to eat pig guts. You can ask a lot of a good friend, but there are limits.