Photo by Ryan Magee | Mercury Staff.
I’ve eaten a lot of pretty
weird things in my life — cow feet, goat brains and jelly fish, just to name a
few. As weird as they may sound, they’re commonplace for me now that I’ve eaten
them many times. This time, I had the opportunity to add cow’s stomach to my
list.
This episode I cooked and
tried menudo, a popular Mexican breakfast soup, with my fellow Mercury staff
member Dulce Espinoza. Menudo was a widely consumed dish just before the
Mexican Revolution among poorer populations who only had access to leftover
parts of animals such as stomach, kidneys and feet. It evolved into a dish made
in bulk and was served among families in Mexico. It’s also considered an
effective hangover cure. Menudo is made with hominy, a type of dried maize,
cow’s feet and tripe, which is cow’s stomach. The ingredients are cooked
together for hours with deliciously spicy chilies and herbs, resulting in a
thick, hearty soup eaten with bread on the side.
Dulce and I cooked the soup at her apartment.
Though preparing the dish was intimidating, it ended up being a lot simpler than
I thought. Cow feet and stomach in particular have to be boiled for hours so
they can be soft and easy to consume. Dulce prepared a pot of boiling water and
put in the feet first, with the tripe to be added a couple of hours later.
While the feet boiled, Dulce and I cut up the
tripe into small cubes. Cutting up the tripe was quite possibly the strangest
experience of my life. It was like cutting up a cold, wet towel that smelled
slightly rancid. Of course, the tripe had been completely rinsed out and devoid
of any stomach juices or other liquids, but the smell still lingered. While I
cut up the tripe, I thought about how weird it was that my own stomach was
about to digest another stomach. It was a unique experience, truly.
We added
the cubed tripe into the pot and let it boil for another couple of hours and
then added the hominy. Dulce had a can of hominy as big as my head and
instructed me to pour three quarters of the can’s contents into the pot. Seeing
as how it was the only other ingredient besides the feet and tripe, I wasn’t
surprised that there was supposed to be this much corn in the soup.
We
finally sat down to try the menudo, which was thick and viscous after cooking
for five hours. The feet had boiled down to become soft, gelatinous chunks
stretched over large bones. The tripe cubes were heavily coated in the thick
soup and looked chewy and flavorful. Dulce and I sprinkled a little lime all
over for taste before we ate.
At first
bite, menudo tastes like a spicy beef stew, but I found myself chewing on the
little tripe pieces for longer than I thought. They felt similar to calamari in
texture and were a little rubbery, but with every bite, I got a burst of the
delicious spicy, meaty goodness coming from the soup. I was used to how the
feet tasted, since my family makes a very similar Pakistani dish called paya,
which is boiled cow’s feet soup. The
hominy tasted nothing like how yellow corn usually tastes, because they were
puffy and harder in texture. In one word, I would describe menudo as
comforting. I can easily see myself eating a bowl when I’m feeling sick or
tired.
Sometimes it takes eating something similar to what you
normally eat to get yourself to try things that are out of your comfort zone.
Menudo is just a soup filled with meat and corn, but it’s the stomach and feet
that make it sound intimidating. Once you get past the unconventional
ingredients, it’s actually pretty awesome.