Paul Covey wrote:

> However, it is interesting
> you say birria should be soupy, as I was in Las Vegas about a year ago,
> and went to a Mexican restaurant well off the strip which I'd read
> through google searches was supposed to be wonderful. I ordered birria,
> which no Mexican restaurant would make here, and it was a wonderfully
> soupy and hot dish.

Good grief. What we have heah, is *unrelenting* fail-yah to comun-cate.
It leads to the endless argument of whether chili should have beans in
it, and what an enchildada or taco is. Now the controversy is how WET
birria is "supposed to be".

How wet do you want your birria to be? Do you want to eat it with a
fork, or with a soup spoon? It's up to you.

How in hell can you people talk about what is "authentic", if you have
no idea of what you're talking about?

Now Paul indicates that he doesn't know what birria is, nor does he
know what mole is.
But he has an opinion about his misconceptions.

In order to communicate about any technical subject, you have to know
the terminology, or you remain adrift in a sea of ignorance.

A major difficulty in discussing Mexican cooking is that the
terminology is in a foreign language, and the same terminology is
applied to different dishes, confusing the uninformed reader, until the
nature of the art of the Mexican kitchen finally dawns upon him.

Combine that with the ad hoc nature of Mexican cooking with whatever
comes to hand, and the fact that many illiterate Mexicans learned to
cook regional dished by watching their mother cook, and then Americans
trying to figure out what goes into any given recipe thrash about
wildly on Usenet and you have mass confusion and argument.

Birria means "MESS". Barbecued ribs could be a form of birria. Or
birria could be a stew.

Birria is messy to eat because it is covered with chile SAUCE, or that
the dish is actually SOUPY. Birria is usually made with inexpensive
trash meat, like the spine of a steer or the spine and ribs of a goat.

You can prepare a soupy, wet mess and it would be a SOPA, or you can
prepare a drier mess that you can eat with a fork, and it would be a
SECO, but it would still be a mess that could be called "birria".

Now, familiar terminology. If you were making Irish stew, you'd boil
the meat and add the vegetables later, so you wouldn't overcook them
and everybody would *know* that you were cooking a stew.

If you wanted to remove the meat and vegetables from the pot and serve
them on a platter in the middle of the table, you'd do that, and you
might called what was left in the pot "soup".

Why is it so hard to see that you can do the same thing with your
birria at home?

The Spanish word for "stew" is GUISO. You make a birria or any other
guiso the same way you'd make an Irish stew. But the term "guiso" is
rarely used. Birria is a guiso, whether it is served as a SOPA or is
served as a SECO.

GUISADO is something that has been stewed, whether it's the backbone
and ribs of a goat or if it's stewed prunes. GUISOTO is a pathetic
stew, a sort of unpretentious ad hoc preparation like marinara sauce.

> By the way Wayne, I think my favorite post of all time was
> yours that told how to make mole, the one that started with selecting
> the oldest turkey you have, the slaughter, etc.

There you go again, with the misunderstanding. MOLE means MASS, it's a
soft mass, and it has nothing to do with a turkey or a chicken or a pig
or a goat.

MOLE is a SAUCE made of boiled, processed, and finally fried chiles and
spices that whatever meat you're using may be boiled in, or finished
in.

A meat that is in a mole sauce may be served as a seco or as a sopa.
Such a dish could also be called a guiso.

The *name* of a mole rarely indicates what kind of meat or fowl is in
the sauce. The name of the mole frequently indicates what color it is,
from the vegetable used for coloration, or it indicates the region that
the mole comes from.

And, there is a messy mole which stains linen table cloths. That's why
it's called "tablecloth stainer". The name of the mole doesn't mean
that the *tablecloth* is part of the recipe...

I hope the above communication hasn't severely damaged anybody's
overweening sense of expertise here ;-)