tripa

Latin had a blunt word for the gut: tripa. It appeared in Roman medical texts and cookery lists without ceremony, denoting the intestines of slaughtered animals. Apicius, writing in the first century, recorded tripe preparations with vinegar and cumin. The word passed unchanged into Vulgar Latin and then into Iberian Romance.

Medieval Spanish kept tripa for offal in general. By the fifteenth century, cooks in Castile were selling dressed tripe in market stalls, and the word had narrowed to the small intestine when referring to the cheapest cuts. Spanish butchers who sailed with Hernán Cortés in 1519 brought the term and the practice to New Spain.

In colonial Mexico, tripa became the domain of street vendors called triperas, women who set up braziers before sunrise near the slaughterhouses of Tlatelolco and later Tepito. The beef small intestine, cleaned, boiled, and griddled until it crisped at the edges, became the filling of a taco that workers bought on their way to the fields or the tanneries. By the nineteenth century, the practice was established enough to appear in travel accounts by foreign visitors to Mexico City.

Today a taco de tripa is one of the canonical forms of Mexico City street food, served at a taquería de guisos alongside carnitas and chicharrón. The cooks keep it crisp and fatty, finished with lime and salsa verde. The Latin gut word, unchanged across two thousand years of sound change, still names exactly what it named in Rome.