Long before Claudette Zepeda became a chef, restaurateur, and culinary anthropologist, she was her Aunt Lorenza’s helper in her Guadalajara restaurant. The restaurant’s origins were humble—a pair of Coca-Cola red tables and plastic chairs—but it quickly grew as word got around about Lorenza’s masterful preparation of pozole rojo, Jalisco’s beloved soup of pork, dried chiles, and hominy. Claudette was tasked with preparing the garnishes to top customers’ bowls, slicing lettuce from the time she was tall enough to reach a tabletop. “My earliest food memory is sitting with a bowl of pozole in front of me,” she told me on a video call.
It is impossible to overstate pozole’s significance. The soup is an artifact predating the 16th century Spanish conquest of Mexico; it was an Aztec recipe centered on their staple food, corn. In Mexico today, pozole is both part of the weekend routine (a nourishing Sunday morning meal to share “as everyone’s licking their wounds from Saturday night,” Claudette
