Menudo Is The Only Food Group That Counts

There were four basic food groups at my house; beans, lard, tortillas and Tang. I was always able to count on three or all of them to make an appearance at the breakfast, lunch and/or dinner table. However Saturday morning belonged to menudo. Menudo can be best described as the miscellaneous of all Mexican cuisine because it can best be described as haggis in caldo.

My father would get the family up at seven in the morning on Sunday, so that we could take our beat up olla and stand in line at Carnicería Ramirez. Then we would separate into factions. The teams would split up in this fashion: My father would quarterback the menudo military strike, sitting back and grabbing the tortillas, while my mom prodded through a sea of onions, chiles and lemons and either me or my sister would order the menudo. The preconception was that the people behind the counter would fall in love with our cuteness and move us to the front of the line.

That was not always the case.

There is an unspoken science to ordering menudo. The trick to ordering menudo in a crowded carnicería was to start acting as ruthless as Charles Oakley underneath a basketball rim, as he went after a rebound. You have to shoulder people and box them out so that you could be noticed. The patrons did not care if you were a child, they would simply stomp past you and chalk it up to experience. You had to take any tears and file them under “S” for “Should have known better.” Simply picking a number was not enough because the menudo dispensary team would call them out in a random fashion.

Once the menudo was ordered, you had to hand over the five dollar bill to the cashier and flash five fingers to the person dispensing it. Then the message was passed on to include patita and exclude hominy. My parents felt that hominy belonged in pozole, and besides if you did not specify the fact, you would go home with a pot filled with hominy. When we were all done we would all meet at the car where my father would be waiting with a cardboard box for the menudo in order to prevent spillage. This is where the fun would begin.

My father topped off our menudo excursions with weekly awards for the “pendejo of the week.” Anyone could be nominated, but your actions would be the deciding factor. If you allowed menudo to spill out of the olla and into the cardboard box – you were punching your ballot. Nuggets of hominy in the menudo were treated like votes that were casted. Pendejo of the week was a fruitless award – it meant that you were unceremoniously stripped from your menudo ordering duties and kicked off the rotation. Pendejos of the week were demoted straight into the doughouse, only to see the sunlight when other pendejos came around to thrust the last pendejo back into good graces. I once held a Cal Ripken Jr.-like streak went from fall to summer, only to be undone by a defective cardboard box. My ego was bruised and my legs suffered from second degree burns that day.

I am grateful to my parents for those breakfasts because I think that’s where I developed my thick skin. We would all sit and have an uncivilized breakfast. My mother would reheat the menudo fearing that it had gone cold during the seven-minute drive. She would grind chiles into a fine, dry powder. My father would cut the lemons and onions as my sister and I set the table. I have always eaten my menudo the same way. I just asked for caldo because I was grossed out by the meat because it looked like spiderwebs to me. I would also request legions and legions of corn tortillas so I could cut them up and make sopas. Finally, I would squeeze so many lemons into my bowl that the harsh orange broth would turn salmon.

Then, as a family, we would sit around and make fun of global pendejos of the week. Ronald Reagan, Tom Lasorda and Saddam Hussein would be constant topics of conversations and therefore dubbed Pendejos of the Millennium. My father would make it a focal point to state that he would be willing to hand out beatdowns should he ever catch any of them roaming the streets of East Los Angeles asking for directions.

The thought of my father punching an Iraqi dictator is enough to warm my heart – even today.

Follow Oscar Barajas on Twitter @Oscarcoatl