Menudo (Mexican soup)

Menudo, also known as Mondongo, pancita ([little] gut or [little] stomach) or mole de panza ("stomach sauce"), is a traditional Mexican soup, made with cow's stomach (tripe) in broth with a red chili pepper base. It is the Mexican variation of the Spanish callos or menudo. Similar dishes exist throughout Latin America and Europe including sopa de mondongo, guatitas, dobrada; trippa alla romana in Italy, or patsas in Greece.

Hominy (in Northern Mexico), lime, onions, and oregano are used to season the broth. It differs from the Filipino dish of the same name, in that the latter does not use tripe, hominy, or a chili sauce.

History

Tripe soups of both beef and mutton have been traditional in Spanish cuisine since at least the 14th century. Don Enrique de Villena refers to them disparagingly in his 1423 Arte Cisoria, saying: "Some eat the tongue and the intestines and tripe and lungs, and are not, in taste or health, such that they should be given to good and fine people." The first part of the novel Guzmán de Alfarache (1599) mentions the protagonist eating beef tripe callos.

With the Spanish colonization of the Americas, the Spanish introduced the tradition of menudo or tripe soups throughout the Americas, including Mexico. The specific Spanish predecessors of Mexican menudo are Southern Spanish menudos, which are red and may include garbanzo beans, just as corn in parts of Mexico: Menudo Gitano (Gypsy menudo), Menudo Andaluz, Menudo Sevillano, and Menudo Gaditano (Cádiz).

In the Mexican cookbook Nuevo y Sencillo Arte de Cocina, Reposteria y Refrescos (1836), Antonia Carrillo includes many menudo recipes, including a beef or mutton caldo de menudo (menudo soup), a veal menudo soup, and a menudo sopa (bread pudding).