Pozole and menudo: Mexico's big-pot soups

Some soups are made for one person and a quiet evening. Pozole is not one of them. It comes out of pots big enough to feed a street, it turns up wherever Mexican families gather to celebrate, and it reaches the table only half finished, with the last few steps left to you.

Its rougher cousin, menudo, keeps a different calendar. Pozole is for the party; menudo is for the morning after. Between them, they cover most of the reasons anyone ever reaches for a ladle.

Corn that blooms

The heart of pozole is hominy: big, pale kernels of maize that have been through nixtamalisation. Dried corn is cooked and soaked in an alkaline solution, traditionally slaked lime or wood ash, which loosens the tough skins, softens the grain and changes its flavour. It is the same ancient process that turns corn into masa for tortillas, and a distant relative of the alkaline salts that give ramen its spring (more on those in our piece on kansui).

For pozole, cooks favour a large-kernelled white corn often sold as cacahuazintle. Simmer it long enough and each kernel splits open at the top and puffs into a soft, chewy little flower. That blooming is the sign the pot is nearly ready, and I think it is one of the most charming things a grain can do in a soup.

The dish is far older than modern Mexico. Its roots reach back before the Spanish arrived, and the name is usually traced to Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs.

Red, green or white

Pozole comes in three broad colours, and friendly arguments over which one is the real thing are part of the tradition.

• Pozole rojo is coloured and gently warmed by dried red chillies such as guajillo and ancho, soaked and blended into the broth. It is the version most closely linked to Jalisco.
• Pozole verde gets its colour from tomatillos, green chillies and herbs, often with ground pumpkin seeds that make the broth nutty and a little thick. It is strongly associated with Guerrero.
• Pozole blanco keeps the pot plain: meat, hominy and broth, with all the heat and colour added at the table. Guerrero claims this one too, and Thursday there is traditionally pozole day.

Pork is the classic meat, usually shoulder, sometimes with trotters or head for richness. Chicken makes a lighter pot. Whatever goes in, the broth simmers for hours, until the meat falls into shreds and the corn has bloomed.

The garnish is half the dish

A bowl of pozole usually arrives with a spread of small plates: shredded cabbage or lettuce, thinly sliced radish, chopped raw onion, dried oregano, lime wedges and ground chilli or a chilli sauce. Crisp tostadas, flat fried tortillas, sit alongside, sometimes with a smear of cream.

This is where you take over. Cabbage cools the broth and adds crunch, radish snaps, onion bites, and oregano rubbed between your palms over the bowl wakes everything up. Lime goes in last. Plain pozole is honest; dressed pozole is a party.

And it really is party food. Pozole is one of the classic dishes of Mexico's Independence Day celebrations in mid-September, when the night of the 15th rings with the Grito, the cry of independence, and the 16th is the national holiday. It also turns up at Christmas and New Year, at birthdays and weddings, and at any gathering where someone owns a pot large enough. Like gumbo in Louisiana, it is a dish that assumes company.

Menudo, the weekend cure

Menudo is made from beef tripe, usually the honeycomb kind, simmered for hours, often with a beef foot for body, in a broth reddened with dried chillies. Many cooks, especially in northern Mexico and the United States, add hominy, which makes it look like pozole's sibling. In central Mexico a similar soup often goes by the name pancita and tends to skip the corn, and some northern cooks leave out the chilli altogether for a white version.

Because it takes so long, menudo is weekend food. A pot started on Saturday is ready for Sunday morning, and it is traditionally a Sunday breakfast for family tables and market counters alike. It also carries a stubborn reputation as a hangover cure. I suspect the salt, fluid, warmth and chilli do more than the tripe itself, but nobody eating it is asking for a study. Hangover soups are a whole genre, by the way: Korea has its own, which you'll find in our guide to Korean soups.

Tripe is mostly about texture: soft but with a little bite, its honeycomb catching the broth. The garnishes rhyme with pozole's: onion, oregano, lime and chilli, with warm corn tortillas or bread on the side.

How to eat them

If you're new to either soup, a few habits make the bowl better.

1. Taste the broth first. Before you add anything, get a sense of how much heat and salt the cook has already given you.
2. Garnish in rounds. Add a little cabbage, radish and onion, eat a few spoonfuls, then add more. The crunch fades quickly once it hits hot broth.
3. Crush the oregano. Rub it between your palms right over the bowl so the oils land in the soup.
4. Save the lime for last. A squeeze at the end lifts a rich pork broth; with menudo it does a lot of the heavy lifting.
5. Use the tostada. Eat it alongside, between spoonfuls, for the crunch the soup doesn't have.
6. Start small with menudo. If tripe is new to you, a small bowl with plenty of lime and onion is a gentle introduction.

What I love about both soups is how much they trust the person eating. The cook does the slow work, hours of simmering and soaking and skimming, and then hands the last minute over to you. That seems to me a generous way to feed people: do the hard part, and let everyone finish the bowl their own way.