(Yes, el sexo. There will be somewhat raunchy penis-talk, in two languages, which won’t be to everyone’s taste, so you’ve been warned. But the centerpiece is the sort of dirty joke that cracks middle-schoolers up, so I don’t see the point in keeping it from kids.)
Yesterday’s adventure in all things posole (in my characteristically American English spelling) / pozole (in the usual Mexican Spanish spelling — in either case, pronounced with an [s]), with my caregiver León Hernández Alvarez (hereafter L). L and I were putting away the (extensive) leftovers from the lunch he had just cooked for us, when I remarked that I had a huge bowl of superb pozole left over from my last restaurant-food order (from El Grullense Grill in Redwood City), and L was stunned.
First, that I had even heard of pozole — Mexican hominy and meat (classically, pork) soup, traditionally red with chiles, fragrant with spices, a bit sharp with citrus juice, and crunchy with cabbage — which he had thought of as utterly Mexican, homey comfort food that the rest of the world didn’t know about (the way Vietnamese pho was before it became fashionable). Then, still more amazing, that it was one of my favorite foods, and had been for decades (like, five decades, from when Ann Daingerfield Zwicky (who died in 1985) and I made it ourselves in Columbus OH, ’cause where in central Ohio in the 1970s would you find pozole?).
Then, to bolster these fantastical claims, I referred him to two pozole postings on this blog: the first from 2011, describing a considerable previous history with pozole; the second, from 2017, with a recipe for an eccentric, deeply non-traditional (but very tasty) variant, based on chicken (plus tomatillos and huge amounts of cilantro). At which, this exchange:
L: But it’s chicken
A: If you can do it with chicken, you can do it with pork
L [laughs out loud]: We say, el pozole como el sexo, entre más puerco mejor (‘pozole is like sex, the more pork the better’)
A [laughs out loud, asks for the joke written down]
Wonderful: a food joke, about pozole, and a dirty joke, about penises. Happy happy joy joy.
The background. Starting with the hinge of the joke, the pun on puerco, ambiguous in Spanish just as pork is in English: between denoting ‘the flesh of a pig used as food’ (NOAD) and, as in GDoS, ‘penis’:
noun pork 1 in senses of flesh … (b) (also purple pork, spicy pork roll) the penis [a cite from 1835, then from 1967 and after; a 2006 cite from George Pelicanos, The Night Gardener: Has someone been puttin their pork inside you?] …
My El Grullense Grill pozole. This turned out not to be pork either (the restaurant’s menu just said pozole soup, with no further information about it). Instead, it was a beef pozole rojo (made with oxtails). I’m fine with that; I’ve liked British style oxtail soup (oxtails cooked in a rich broth with root vegetables) since I was a teenager, and more recently have been a fan of the Jamaican braised oxtail at my neighborhood Coconuts Caribbean restaurant.
It was quite satisfying the first time around, and then left over, amended by the addition of large amounts of grated parmesan cheese (from L’s pasta project). My soups tend to go on and on, getting altered with each new day. Soup of the evening, endless soup.
The two previous postings on this blog:
— in my 11/24/11 posting “Thanksgiving meals”, with an annotated posole recipe
— in my 2/25/17 posting “Posole verde with chicken”, with the chicken, the tomatillo salsa, and a ton of cilantro, of which I’m very fond (yes, I know that many people detest it)