feminist blogs

The chokingly fragrant menudo leaves no doubt as to the part of the animal from which the meat was excavated — menudo may be L.A.’s favorite hangover remedy, but it is hard to imagine confronting this menudo on a stomach trembly with drink.  --Jonathan Gold, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, on El Atacor #11

Other than its curative properties after a big night of enjoying entirely-too-much alcohol, you know what I like about Mexican menudo? It's certainly not the cooking of it. A "from-scratch" authentic batch of menudo requires an interminable amount of prep time at a time when it's healing magic is required immediamente! Also, I'm not particularly enamored with a few of the ingredients. I choose to leave the pigs feet out of my bowl, for example.

No, I appreciate menudo for the celebration of culinary and class ingenuity that it is:

Menudo is yet another sacred ethnic dish that has its roots firmly planted in peasant food heritage. Menudo is also a byproduct of conflict. Long ago in northern Mexico, the select cuts of a town's cattle would go to battle-weary and hungry Mexican soldiers while the leftovers went to the peasant folk. These leftovers consisted largely of Fear Factor staples like innards, tails, hooves, et al. Inventive and/or desperate peasant cooks created a soup that made good use of a couple of these ingredients - the stomach (tripe) and calf's foot (hoof). Classic menudo is basically a slowly cooked stew of honeycomb tripe and calf's foot later infused with several varieties of chiles and spices and balanced in flavor and texture with white hominy. It's presented as a soup and served with corn tortillas.

Unlike most pseudo-Mexican fare popular in El Norte, menudo has yet to be extricated of its mojo by the likes of Sandra Lee, Rachel Ray, Chevy's and Taco Bell ...which is another reason why I long for it:

Maybe no other dish reveals the divide between America and Mexico, steeper than any border wall could ever rise. America's taste for violence ends at the table. We like our meat in the form of muscle, free of the slaughterhouse whiff that clings to organs. Mexico has less-conflicted animal appetites. A well-made menudo, like the one here, both wallows in and triumphs over the carnal. Call it the crowning achievement of a meat cuisine steeped in Catholic theology, the transcendence of the fleshy ...

Menudo also conjures home and childhood for me. While my mother was an accomplished cook who could make as mean a mole as Diana Kennedy, my aunt Rosie and, by turns, her aunt Rosa, were my family's designated makers of all Mexican cuisine during the holidays. Perfectly wood-chip-grilled carne asada was the star of the show on all non-Winter holiday gatherings. Our Christmases included entirely-too-generous servings of turkey/mole tamales, sweet white masa raisin/pineapple tamales, birria, cochinita pibil, Rosca de Reyes ("Don't bite into the baby Jesus!"), and the like.

Unsurprisingly, after an evening of drinking salted keg-beer on-the-rocks, no adults in our family had the vim and vigor to turn out a good pot in the morning, even though menudo consumption was practically a requirement on New Year's Day. No, we enjoyed our "Breakfast of Champions" in one of many of Los Angeles' mom-and-pop tacquerias.

While living in San Diego during my college and just-post-college years, I made an annual trip to Puerto Nuevo with a carload of not-so-sober friends for an adventure and a New Year's Day menudo fix. Which, I think, surprised the locals who were much more used to SDSU gringettes showing up for langostino y fifty-cent coronas. Since then, with the exception of a four-year adulthood stint in LA year's later, my menudo jonesin' has been left unsatisfied.