Whatcha Eatin’? Menudo (2024)

• April 15, 2019
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I’ve eaten a lot of prettyweird things in my life — cow feet, goat brains and jelly fish, just to name afew. As weird as they may sound, they’re commonplace for me now that I’ve eatenthem many times. This time, I had the opportunity to add cow’s stomach to mylist.

This episode I cooked andtried menudo, a popular Mexican breakfast soup, with my fellow Mercury staffmember Dulce Espinoza. Menudo was a widely consumed dish just before theMexican Revolution among poorer populations who only had access to leftoverparts of animals such as stomach, kidneys and feet. It evolved into a dish madein bulk and was served among families in Mexico. It’s also considered aneffective 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 cookedtogether for hours with deliciously spicy chilies and herbs, resulting in athick, 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 thanI thought. Cow feet and stomach in particular have to be boiled for hours sothey can be soft and easy to consume. Dulce prepared a pot of boiling water andput in the feet first, with the tripe to be added a couple of hours later.While the feet boiled, Dulce and I cut up thetripe into small cubes. Cutting up the tripe was quite possibly the strangestexperience of my life. It was like cutting up a cold, wet towel that smelledslightly rancid. Of course, the tripe had been completely rinsed out and devoidof any stomach juices or other liquids, but the smell still lingered. While Icut up the tripe, I thought about how weird it was that my own stomach wasabout to digest another stomach. It was a unique experience, truly.

We addedthe cubed tripe into the pot and let it boil for another couple of hours andthen added the hominy. Dulce had a can of hominy as big as my head andinstructed me to pour three quarters of the can’s contents into the pot. Seeingas how it was the only other ingredient besides the feet and tripe, I wasn’tsurprised that there was supposed to be this much corn in the soup.

Wefinally sat down to try the menudo, which was thick and viscous after cookingfor five hours. The feet had boiled down to become soft, gelatinous chunksstretched over large bones. The tripe cubes were heavily coated in the thicksoup and looked chewy and flavorful. Dulce and I sprinkled a little lime allover for taste before we ate.

At firstbite, menudo tastes like a spicy beef stew, but I found myself chewing on thelittle tripe pieces for longer than I thought. They felt similar to calamari intexture and were a little rubbery, but with every bite, I got a burst of thedelicious spicy, meaty goodness coming from the soup. I was used to how thefeet tasted, since my family makes a very similar Pakistani dish called paya,which is boiled cow’s feet soup. Thehominy tasted nothing like how yellow corn usually tastes, because they werepuffy and harder in texture. In one word, I would describe menudo ascomforting. I can easily see myself eating a bowl when I’m feeling sick ortired.

Sometimes it takes eating something similar to what younormally 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 feetthat make it sound intimidating. Once you get past the unconventionalingredients, it’s actually pretty awesome.