Tacos de Buche y Nana (Nenepil)

This is a Ciudad de México taco. Specifically a fritanga taco, the kind sold from a copper cazo at a folding table on a Saturday morning in Colonia Doctores, Tepito, or Colonia Obrera, where the woman behind the cazo has been doing this since before you were born and her mother did it before her.

Buche is pork stomach. Nana is pork uterus. Put them together, chopped fine, simmered first and then confited in lard, and you have nenepil. The word comes from Nahuatl, nenepilli, meaning mixture or tongue, and it is what every chilanga knows to order when she walks up to a fritanga stand and wants the cook to know she is from here. Tourists order suadero. People from CDMX order nenepil.

Do not let the cuts scare you. These are the cuts that built Mexican working-class cooking and they are the cuts that make the best tacos in the capital. The buche is dense and chewy and takes on the chile flavor of whatever it sits in. The nana is softer, almost silky, and it carries the lard like a sponge. Together they are textured, rich, and savory in a way that suadero cannot touch. La manteca es el sabor.

My mother did not make nenepil at home. Nobody does. This is street food, fritanga food, weekend food. But I have stood at a cazo in Mercado de San Juan with a fritanguera who let me chop her buche while she watched and corrected my knife angle. She told me: 'The lard is not optional. The double tortilla is not optional. The salsa is not optional. Everything else is.' I wrote it down in the same notebook my mother left me. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.