Mayor Stirs the Pot and Cooks Up a Menudo Festival

Across the town of San Fernando, in kitchens where pigs’ feet hang from clothespins and caldrons bubble with murky soup, families are gearing up for a historic event that may put this city on the culinary map: a menudo cook-off.

The soup made from cow’s stomach, pigs’ feet and hominy is quintessentially Mexican, and this Sunday San Fernando will sponsor its first menudo festival to celebrate its Mexican American heritage.

Short-order cooks, office secretaries, moms, dads, even an Irish nun are among the menudo masters pitted against each other for the best recipe.

A dish valued in part for its reputed ability to cure hangovers, menudo may not enjoy the mass appeal of other varieties of Mexican food like tacos or tamales.

But Mayor Jose Hernandez, who came up with the idea, is confident he is on to something--big.

“We will be the world’s capital of menudo!” promised the 69-year-old Hernandez. “You know that garlic festival in Gilroy each year? Well, someday that’ll be us.”

Whether they can draw 150,000 someday (what Gilroy did last year) is open to question; this year the mayor says he’ll be happy with 5,000 people.

The concept of an annual menudo cook-off came to Hernandez while he was eating menudo one Sunday morning, the traditional time when the dish is enjoyed. As the mayor peered into a steaming bowl of the reddish soup, he realized that there must be hundreds of other people in his community at that moment doing the same thing.

“This town has been raised on bowls of menudo,” he said.

San Fernando, population 24,000, is 83% Latino, according to City Hall statistics. In many ways it feels more like Mexico City than a town in the San Fernando Valley.

It has more churches than ATMs, more youth mariachi bands than Boy Scout troops and an army of street vendors, including men who push shopping carts of cleaning supplies down the sidewalk while honking a rubber horn.

Even Chinese restaurants in San Fernando have neon signs in Spanish. “Comida China Rapida” one reads.

So, this summer, in an effort to connect with his community, the mayor planned the cook-off. A fired-up city staff even persuaded Walt Disney Co. to help pay for menudo aprons, banners and the first-place trophy, a gleaming copper pot.

The contest rules are simple: show up with a crock pot of menudo, no garnishes allowed. Though recipes may vary, all must include tripe (that’s the lining of a cow’s stomach) and hominy. The mayor is a judge, along with four others, including a TV weatherman and a food critic from La Opinion.

Local restaurants will be selling menudo samples and the actual contest is set to begin at high noon Sunday in front of St. Ferdinand’s Roman Catholic Church, 1109 Coronel St. in downtown San Fernando.

This week about 30 contestants have been scrambling to perfect their recipes and get their hands on high quality tripe--the honeycomb stuff that sells for about $3 a pound.

Sister Carmel Somers has cooked menudo only once before. But as a nun born in Ireland 60 years ago and a San Fernando resident for 13 years, she’s determined to bring a respectable offering to the contest.

“Sometimes when you come from a different ethnic background, you have to go beyond the call of duty,” she said.

Everybody, it seems, makes menudo for different reasons and in different ways. Contestant Danny Solis once whipped up a batch in a wheelbarrow.

It was raining that day and his Weber grill was all wet. So Solis, a lifelong San Fernando resident, filled a wheelbarrow from his garage with charcoal and set down a huge pot of menudo. He favors the slow-cook approach. And he goes heavy on the chili.

“That’s why my menudo is so good for hangovers,” Solis said. “It’s so spicy you just sweat all the poison out.”

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If you’ve never had menudo, picture a soup the color and thickness of minestrone but instead of chunks of potato and carrot there are chunks of tripe and pigs’ feet (or marrow from cow’s hooves). Tripe has the slippery, rubbery texture of calamari and not such a strong taste if it has been washed and cooked correctly.

Traditional menudo is also made with chili powder and garlic and served with spoonfuls of chopped onions and fresh cilantro.

Menudo is thought to have originated in northern Mexico with roots in Continental cuisine. There’s a fancy French dish called tripes a la mode de Caen that’s somewhat similar.

Marilyn Tausend, author of a Mexican American cookbook, said one of menudo’s greatest charms is its authenticity.

“So much of Mexican food has been appropriated by American culture,” she said. “But if you eat menudo, you really understand what Mexican people eat.”

The name menudo comes from the Spanish word menudillos, which refers to the stomach lining. Menudo can also mean small or cute, which is how the Puerto Rican teeny-bopper band (that pop sensation Ricky Martin used to perform in) got its name.

But what about the old wives’ tale that menudo cures hangovers? Many entrants in Sunday’s contest and mayor Hernandez himself swore that slurping down a bowl of menudo was like turning back the clock on a night of many beers.

“It does have a lot of iron and vitamins, the chili gives you a good kick, so I guess you could say it is a restorative,” Tausend said.

And there’s no coincidence, Tausend said, that serious menudo fans turn to the dish Sunday mornings and every year on New Year’s Day.

This millennium year, better stock up on hominy and tripe.