You wouldn't think it, but Sheboygan has some of the best Mexican dishes served up this side of the border. It's still a big mystery how it is possible that just only a day ago, I was served the best and most appetizing hot rich bowl of Menudo in my life at El Camino. This is not even a hyperbole because Menudo is such a simple dish. An otherwise bland dish composed of tripe, hominy, water, chile, salt and pepper...livened up with fresh lime, onion and cilantro garnishes. It's always been Mexican soulfood for me, tightly knotted in memories of long weekends working the La Mirada swap meet in California. In my days of childhood enslavement, menudo was always a good reason for my parents to let me loose on a lunch break to the catering truck stands where they served home made menudo. After a short lived obsession with Menudo, the boy band of the 80's, I rediscovered Menudo in a different light. The taste test begun between a food fight between catering trucks, which lead us to venture further into local restaurants...subconsciously feeding into my obsession with Mexican culture till I got a first bite of my ex-boyfriend's mom's Menudo to which I am still unable to replicate. Still, in one variation or another (more salt, less salt, more fat, less fat, longer boil, shorter boil, etc.), the ingredients seemed to remain hardfastly traditional and unchanged.
Then there is El Camino's version of serious smack down Menudo, and these people mean serious business here. The soup arrives, in a deep smokey rich peppery redness generously filled with tender loving tripe. Gaelle takes a first dip of her spoon into the broth and already we both see that this was not any water based broth. It coated her spoon thickly even after leaving the bowl and into her virgin Menudo mouth. Wow, according to Gaelle, was the taste of Sheboygan County's version of Menudo. What makes this version so special and loving is the fact that the chef at El Camino, Momma Camino, must have cooked 50 pounds of beef bones with thick tendons for ten days because we found melt in your mouth fist sized tendons, boiled down knuckles among everything else in the bowl. We know that Momma Camino loves us dearly because there was not a centimeter thick layer of grease one would expect from this level of boiled down stock. The cook took painful care to remove excess fat from this stock so that what would remain would simply be soup, soup and soup. It was a glorious spicey beef brew and perhaps an incomparable way of making an otherwise straight forward dish.
This journey into Sheboygan's underground food culture, not so underground since El Camino's magnificant renovation, has already turned me upside down in my prior prejudgments about dull Midwestern cuisine. Two taste tests into Gaelle and my adventure and I'm starting to see what a greater anomoly Sheboygan may in fact be. Who would have thought that the country's best Italian, Mexican, British and American cuisines could be found deep in the belly button of the United States?
