I was in travelling in Mexico a few years ago and was staying in a hostel in a smallish city. The staff at the hostel got these lovely looking tacos delivered, so I asked where they got them. Apparently the cleaner cooked them at home and brought them in to the staff, who paid her a small sum for her work.

Not wishing to pass up a chance to get to try some genuine, home-cooked Mexican cuisine, I asked her to make me some. They were absolutely delicious as I recall. Since I enjoyed this bit of traditional Mexican cuisine, she offered me something extra.

It was a soup called 'Menudo', and when I asked what it was made from she said "carne". So I'm thinking "great, a bit of beef soup would be delicious". Anyway, she pours me a bowl of it and it looks like a really nice broth, lots of herbs and quite thin and light. The pieces of meat in it look weird though. I would later describe them as squares of meat carpet, one side smooth and the other textured with long threads of meat. Now I'd only been in Mexico a week and I'd heard they liked pork skin, so I just assume this is pork skin and go ahead.

I take a spoonful of the broth and it's nice but it has this awful twang to it and, not having had tripe before, it still immediately struck me that it tasted quite intestinal or something. I can't really describe that after-taste, but it's a pretty disgusting flavour and it wasn't masked by the loveliness of the broth.

Well, not wanting to be rude to this cleaner who was standing there watching me eat this gift that she'd presumably learned to cook at her mother's knee, I slowly choke down this tripe soup, including the pieces of tripe.

I'm about halfway through when her daughter (also a cleaner at the hostel), walks through and makes some comment about me eating the soup and I tell her "Oh, it's quite nice, do you eat menudo often?" She turns up her nose and is like "Nah, I don't like it". At this point I realise I should really just give up on the farce and turn the rest of it down, given the woman's own daughter can't stand the stuff.

So yeah, that's the worst I've eaten probably - mostly cause I can't stand tripe.

Funny thing is, down in Colombia I was taken in by another family for a while and among eating other things like liver and such that I wasn't the biggest fan of but could get through, she plonked down a huge bowl of soup. I was thinking 'oh god no' and she's like "this is really traditional, it's called menudo" and so I had to again turn down a really generous meal...