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.
