Cabeza

When sold in restaurants, customers may ask for particular parts of the body meats they favor, such as ojo (eye), oreja (ear), cachete (cheek), lengua (tongue), sesos (brains), or labios (lips).

Barbacoa in Mexico, refers to the local indigenous variation of the primitive method of cooking in a pit or earth oven.

Although now considered by many as "offal",[8][9] eating beef or calf’s head was once a mainstream and highly prized dish all across the Western World up until the early 20th century.

Besides being a highly prized, mainstream dish, another reason why Barbacoa de cabeza was prepared in Mexico and South America was out of the need to use every part of the cow after slaughtering it for tasajo.

That night there would be a great feast: pieces of liver, kidneys and the loin on the spit over an open fire and the rest would be sliced and salted, and the head cooked in "barbacoa" in a hole made in the ground, that the next day would become a meal fit for kings.”19th century recipes for Barbacoa de Cabeza are common and appear in many Mexican cookbooks of that time.

An often repeated and unsubstantiated story among the Chicanos and Tejanos is that barbacoa de cabeza was invented in Texas, specifically in the South of the state, by Tejano vaqueros (cowboys) who were supposedly paid by their Anglo bosses by giving them the unwanted parts, the offal, of the slaughtered cattle, ignoring the fact that barbacoa de cabeza has a long history throughout Mexico and South America.

[17] The hypothesis holds that such dishes were only known to South Texas, considering the limited number of heads, per carcass and the fact the meat was not available commercially, the barbacoa de cabeza tradition remained regional and relatively obscure for many years, probably familiar only to vaqueros, butchers, and their families.

On the contrary, evidence shows that Tejanos were the ones giving away the calf heads and sweetbreads to Anglo-American and European arrivals to Texas in the 19th century as they themselves didn’t find them valuable.

[23] So the assumption that Anglo Texas ranchers were giving away beef heads as payment because they found no value in them has no basis, considering that the opposite was true.

Beef heads, wrapped in aluminum foil, cooked in barbacoa.
A taco stand advertising tacos de cabeza in Tijuana , Mexico
A Barbacoa de Cabeza recipe from 1836, from the Mexican cookbook “ Nuevo y Sencillo Arte de Cocina, Repostería y Refrescos ” by Antonia Carrillo.
Boiled calf’s head and tongue, from the American cookbook “The American Home Cook Book” (1854). Beef head, tongue, sweetbreads, and brain, used to be a mainstream and highly prized dish in American cuisine.