Tacos de Obispo

The obispo belongs to Tenancingo, a town in the southern highlands of the State of México below Toluca, where it has been made at least since the 1930s. It grew out of pig-slaughter thrift — a way to use the brains, spinal cord, liver, heart and trimmings that would otherwise be wasted, bound with spices and dried fruit and cased in the animal's own stomach. The name "bishop" has several competing folk explanations: that clergy who tasted it pronounced it fit for a bishop; that the dish was prepared for a bishop of Toluca who visited the town; and, most plainly, that the purplish-mauve color of the fried sausage recalls a bishop's cassock. Since 2004 Tenancingo has held an annual Feria del Obispo each August in its Jardín Morelos, and the sausage is now a marker of mexiquense regional identity.

Cut from the casing, each slice shows a dense, coarse mosaic — flecks of meat and offal bound tight, studded with whole raisins and broken almonds and pine nuts, the whole thing fried to a purplish-brown crust at the edges. The texture is firm and a little crumbly, somewhere between a country pâté and a fried sausage. The flavor is deep and offaly from the brain and liver, lifted by warm spice and the small bursts of sweetness from the raisins, all of it wrapped hot in a soft corn tortilla with a spoon of green salsa.

The pig's stomach is the working part of the recipe: scrubbed and turned, it becomes a natural casing tough enough to hold a coarse, wet filling of meat and organs through a long poach without bursting. Poaching first sets the sausage all the way through and renders some fat, so the later frying is only to crisp and color, not to cook. That fry is where the "bishop" color appears — iron-rich blood and the myoglobin of the offal brown and darken in the pan to the characteristic purplish-mauve. The raisins, almonds and pine nuts are a colonial-era signature: dried fruit and nuts season and sweeten the organ meats, the same trick that tames offal in many Mexican stuffed dishes.