Dame una sangwich de lengue por favor, mamasota.
Oh, my.
(I got all excited when you mentioned salivary glands and ‘lengue’ - and now I’m a REAL mess :-)
Ha, for some it more the thought of what it is vs how it looks or tastes. Lengua looks just like finely shreaded beef or diced cubes it has a fairly strong beefy flavor perfect for tangy salsas. Beef cheeks have an almost identical tastes deeply beefy they are the main portions of true barbacoa which is the whole head slow cooked overnight then picked apart with cheeks, tongue being the main meat cuts. Prior to the BSE made cow issue the brains would also be chopped into it for a truly whole head taco but now it’s illegal in the USA. Mexico still will do whole head for those brave enough to eat it.
Chorizo the real stuff comes in two forms the northern form is a soft sausage cased but the casing is taken off to cook it. It is primarily beef or pork salivary glands,lymph nodes, sweet breads with or without the tongue and cheeks usually not those last two. The other form is closer to Spanish chorizo it’s solid and cased with the casing staying on while cooking it is diced up the solid version nearly always has the whole cheeks in it. The soft version is fried in manteca which is pork fat and rendered out frying into little bits which is then mixed with eggs to make a bright orange scrambled egg mixture which is then put hot into fresh tortillas. The hard version is served a number of ways including on borillo rolls or as chivito with pork cutlets with or without eggs.
Dame una sangwich de lengue por favor, mamasota.
There are more advanced level breakfast tacos. Tripas is one those are intestines, soaked in milk then stewed till tender then fried till crispy. Chicharon is stewed or fried skin tacos both are readily available in the SA. Tripas are a time honored tradition they are done in a discado cooker which is a plow disk with the hole welded shut in the center making a wok like device it’s heated over open mesquite coals in the morning after digging up the barbacoa and the pot of tripas in the same hole. The cowboys then fry the tripas while cooking the tortillas around the outer rim it’s a south Texas cowboy breakfast few will get to actually experience. One line of my family has run cattle in South Texas for nearly 300 years it’s a birth right.