Moronga Frita con Salsa Verde

This is breakfast in Tlaxcala. It is also breakfast in the small towns of Hidalgo, in the fondas that open at six in the morning and serve workers heading into the fields or the mines. Moronga frita is not a delicate dish and it is not trying to be. It is dark, iron-rich, perfumed with hierbabuena, and crisped in lard until the edges crackle. Eaten in a corn tortilla with a green salsa sharp enough to wake you up.

Moronga is blood sausage. The Spanish brought the technique. Tlaxcala and Hidalgo made it their own by seasoning the blood with hierbabuena, that softer, rounder cousin of mint that grows wild in the central highlands, and by frying it in manteca with onion and chile serrano. Other states have their own versions. Yucatan has rellena. The norte has its own variation. But the central highlands moronga with hierbabuena is its own thing, and that is what you are making.

My mother did not cook moronga. It was not a Jalisco dish. I learned it from a senora named Dona Refugio at the Mercado de Tulancingo in Hidalgo, who pulled me behind her counter at seven in the morning and showed me how she crumbled it into the pan, how she waited for the crust to form before she stirred. She told me people are afraid of moronga because they hear the word blood and they stop listening. She said: tell them it tastes like the best chorizo they have ever eaten, only deeper. She was right. Cada estado, su propia cocina.