Entry · catalog no. 1146
hog maws
/ /hɔɡ mɔz/ /HAWG MAWZ
noun · American South, especially the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee; carried to Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia and New York · 1800s
✓ Verified
1.
The stomach of a hog, cleaned down to the muscular outer wall with the inner lining stripped away, then boiled long and seasoned heavily — most often cooked in the same pot as chitterlings, cut up and served with hot sauce, vinegar and cornbread. The cleaning is the labor of the dish and the reason it carries so much family memory: it is a two-day job usually done for a holiday, and who cleans them is a household fact people remember for decades. The term also travels in the fixed pair chitlins and hog maws, which names the whole holiday offal plate rather than the stomach alone.
“Grandmama cleaned the chitlins and hog maws the day before Christmas Eve, same as every year.”
Origin & Attribution
Enslaved Black Southerners, from the plantation hog-killing season onward, and carried past Emancipation into sharecropping households and then into the Great Migration cities. At December hog killings the enslaved were issued the parts the household would not eat — feet, ears, tail, head, intestines and the stomach — and West and Central African practice, which already used the whole animal, turned the ration into a cuisine. The dish stayed on Black tables after freedom because it was cheap and because it had become holiday food. Two corrections: the Pennsylvania Dutch stuffed-and-roasted hog maw is a separate dish under the same English name and is not the ancestor of this one; and hog maws is not interchangeable with chitterlings, which are the intestines, even though the two are cooked together.
1962
LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) publishes "Soul Food," arguing that Black America has a distinct cuisine and cataloguing its parts
2008
Frederick Douglass Opie's Hog and Hominy traces the hog-based foodway from West Africa through slavery to soul food
2013
Adrian Miller's Soul Food places hog maws among the dishes that define the cuisine
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
American South, especially the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee; carried to Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia and New York · 1800s
Spoken by
Black Southern families and their Northern and Western descendants; soul food restaurants; butcher counters serving Black neighborhoods
$HOGMAWThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Fading64 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
45/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1962
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
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Citations & Sources
■
Frederick Douglass Opie, Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)
book · scholarly
■
Adrian Miller, Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013)
book · scholarly
■
+ Cite a sourceLeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), "Soul Food" (1962), collected in Home: Social Essays (New York: William Morrow, 1966)
essay · printed
See also