Eggcorn Forum

A poor eggcorn, if it qualifies at all, but easier to say and an understandable inter-species leap. I can imagine allowing children to misconstrue such foodstuffs and its pronunciation takes a variety of forms: chitlins/chicklins/chidlins etc.

‘Soul food’ in the US, here in northern/midlands areas it is fondly remembered by older folk, and it’s still available from a sadly diminished number of family butchers. Enthusiasts speak of “chickerlings and bag”, the ‘bag’ being pigs’ bladder apparently, and “chitlins and jot”, jot being one of the quartet of reed, weasand, honeycomb and jot, whatever they may be.

Hereabouts chitterlings are intestines turned inside out, cleaned, plaited (!), boiled and fried. Yum!

Online Etymology Dictionary

late 13c., cheterlingis “entrails, souse, small intestines of a swine fried for food” (early 13c. in surnames), a word of obscure origin, probably from an unrecorded Old English word having something to do with entrails (related to Old English cwið “womb;” compare German Kutteln “guts, bowels, tripe, chitterlings,” Old Norse kviðr “womb,” Gothic qiþus “womb”). Variants chitlins (1842) and chitlings (1880) both also had a sense of “shreds, tatters.”

but I can’t help feeling that the pioneering lexicographer Nathan Bailey may have been a little closer with this entry from his An Etymological English Dictionary:

“Chitterlings q. d. Shitterlings, becaufe the Excrements are contained in them . . . Hogs Guts drefsed for Food; alfo a fort or Pudding of Saufage.”

CHICKERLINGS & BAG. You don’t see this much today either, the last time I had some many years ago all you could taste were cleaning fluids again.

(I’m not sure if it’s cowheel he has stewed in a white sauce? I know he loves Chicklins and bag.) ...

We always had faggots & peas, chickerlings etc. whealks and Mussels [still do have mussels – do them just like my mother did].

I had an uncle who was a respected tripe dealer and serviced all Yorkshire with his wares. Used to bring us two stainless steel buckets full of honeycomb tripe, elder, chickerlings, cow heels and udder. Mixed with boiled onions, a meal fit for a king. That’s why all my family are in their nineties. Luvly grub.