Birria

When life gives you tough meat… invent a new tasty dish!

Today’s New York Times Spelling Bee letters:

A, B, D, L, O, R, and center I (all words must include I)

Merriam-Webster says…

Silly little dictionary! Don’t you know birria can’t possibly be a word if the New York Times says it ain’t?

For further fascinating facts, check out the Spelling Bee Master.

What’s your favorite dord* from today’s puzzle?

My Two Cents

As soon as I started working on today’s column I realized that the New York Times knows very well what a birria is. One of the example sentences given by the dictionary is “Customers sometimes drive hours for its … lamb birria.” And who wrote it? Janelle Brown. What year? 2003. And for whom did she write that sentence? The New York Times. Well, actually, she wrote an entire article, not just that sentence. But you get the point.

To make things really ridiculous, the paper published another article on this food item –– barely a year ago!–– claiming birria was becoming a TikTok and Instagram star. Don’t believe me? Here:

If you’re not a subscriber and have already reached your monthly limit on free Times articles, just wait a few hours until March 1st rolls around.

So why is birria not a valid answer in today’s Spelling Bee game? To paraphrase an almost 100-year old superhero named The Shadow: “Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of Sam Ezersky?

Goat, hold the -se

If you have no idea what goatse is, you should be happy your eyeballs were never seared by that image. Unless you’re into that sort of thing; I’m not one to judge. Honest. Just google the word and see for yourself, if you dare. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

When it comes to the word birria, our friends at Merriam-Webster aren’t very helpful about its origin. They say simply that it was “borrowed from Mexican Spanish” around the 1960s. So the crux of the etymology is the meaning of birria in Spanish.

Yeah, I know that’s not very helpful if you don’t speak a lick of the language. Still, I wanted to prove to you that I’m not always just making things up. (Or maybe I did make up that entry on my computer… you’ll never know for sure. Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!)

The first entry translates into English as “person or thing of little value or importance”. Ouch! The entry that references the Mexican dish is the fourth one. The third entry is interesting, in that birria means “addicted to a game, sport, or hobby” in Colombia and Panama. Even I learn stuff when I make things up!

According to Juan Ramón Cardenas in his book La Senda del Cabrito (The Route of the Goat), the dish was given that name because after the Conquistadores arrived in Mexico, the goats they had brought with them went into a sexual frenzy and overpopulated. So to make up for all the killing and pillaging and raping the Conquistadores had subjected the Aztecs to, the indigenous peoples received… crappy meat. Apparently goat meat was looked down upon by the Spaniards as tough, smelly, and uncookable. (That last adjective is actually a word I just made up… I mean, coined.)

But the natives were smart and skilled, and so they used their spices and marinating techniques to produce a tasty dish.

Well, not that same one you see in the picture; after all, that photo was probably taken this century.

Still, the derisive word birria stuck as a name for the dish, which has become one of the most famous dishes from the Central Mexican states of Jaliso and Michoacan. Today the ancestral recipe is made into a soup or stew from a combination of goat meat, adobo, garlic, cumin, bay leaves, and thyme. Sometimes beef or lamb can be substituted for goat. The meat is cooked slowly at a low heat in a pot, which differentiates it from barbacoa, which is the technique of slow-cooking food over an open fire or in a hole dug in the ground and covered with agave leaves.

Yes, the English word barbecue comes from the Taino barbacoa, in case you were wondering. And that’s something I definitely have not made up.

The word birria has birthed a couple of related terms. A birrieria is a restaurant or street car that sells the dish. And a birriero is someone skilled in preparing it.

That picture looks blurry because that birriero is so skilled the entire place shook as he chopped up the meat!

According to Tejal Rao’s Times article, “there’s also more than one way to prepare birria. Many variations are regional, but others have been shaped by expert birrieros over the years, based on their tastes and limitations.”

And speaking of variations…

Say cheese!

The quesabirria (“cheese birria”) was someone’s genius idea of adding cheese to a birria. Sort of. The main dish is actually birria-style cooked beef folded into a tortilla. Then dolloped or covered with melted cheese and served with consommé (an intensely-flavored broth soup). The quesabirria is the dipped into the soup before every bite.

Hungry yet? I just had dinner and my mouth is watering!

Quesabirria was invented in Tijuana, Mexico, so north of the state of Jalisco where the traditional birria was born. And like it’s cheese-less cousin, quesabirria is enjoying a Warholesque 15 minutes of fame on insta. Eater also wrote an article about how this food mash was now “The Bay Area’s Hottest Taco Trend”.

As the article explains, quesabirria is “a cross between a taco and a quesadilla.” The preferred meat seems to be beef, which is also stewed slowly with peppers and spices. There are already a couple of interesting spins being offered on the quesabirria:

…a few other variations on the quesabirria theme — vampiritos, a version with no tortilla, just a crispy cheese skirt as the base; and birriaquiles, a twist on chilaquiles wherein the chips are smothered in birria and consomé.

Okay… I think I’m going to end up having a second dinner tonight.

In case you want to make your own birria, you can try this recipe by Abraham Tamez. If you prefer its cheesy counterpart, follow these steps.

So, if you’re ever in central Mexico, stop by a birrieria and ask for some birrio. Just cross your fingers that the birriero isn’t a fan of the Spelling Bee…because the editors of the Spelling Bee decided that birria is a dord*… and you’ll go hungry.

You can check out my previous entry on another dord* here:

What the heck is a dord, you ask? Here’s the answer: