Now I’m all about a good steak, and pairing it with a lobster tail for surf and turf is delicious. If I’m feeling like pasta, it’s gotta be carbonara, and I’ll jump at anything with peanut sauce on a Thai menu. I have made my affection for the French Dip sandwich known, as well as the pride I feel that it was “invented” in my native Los Angeles, and that I visit Phillippe’s from whence it originated any time I am home in the city of angels. Also in my top ten are shrimp (just about any preparation), phở (Vietnamese soup consisting of broth, herbs, sprouts, rice noodles, and chicken or beef), and Eggs Benedict.
But nothing holds a candle, compares to, or comes close to the love, the devotion, the excitement, the obsession, or the sheer joy I feel for one food. It stands above all others. It is…
The taco.
My obsession began in the early ‘90s when Mike, my oldest friend on the planet who has put up with me and my nonsense for four decades, and I would make early morning runs to a very sketchy industrial part of our hometown, Glendale California.
There, on the corner of San Fernando Road and Colorado Street we’d stand in line with drunks headed home from bars, some very questionable folks who were either on their way up or their way down with the help of – let’s just call them substances, and probably a few prostitutes, because that is where it parked. It probably had a name, maybe that of its owner. The name didn’t, and doesn’t, really matter; we just called it…
The taco truck.
There are seven nights in a week, we made our pilgrimage to the taco truck on six of them, usually between 2 and 3 in the early morning hours. You could say we were religious about it.
The plates were paper. There were no tables. Hell, at 2 in the morning there was no light, save whatever emanated from inside the taco truck! There was no menu. You had two choices: what kind of meat, and how many. We ate in Mike’s car. It was amazing!
One of the great things about a taco is that it is its own utensil, and this is deeply rooted in its origin, which we’ll get to in a moment. As for napkins… ha! They would rip you off a paper towel from a roll inside the taco truck, if you asked. But you had to ask, and asking revealed that you were new to the world of real tacos, not those Americanized mass-produced knock offs you find at Taco Bell.
The origin of the word ‘taco’ comes from Nahuatl. Nahuatl, sometimes referred to as Aztec, or Mexicano, is a language or group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family, spoken by about 1.7 million Nahuas, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. They comprise the largest indigenous group in Mexico and have smaller populations in the United States. Taco comes from tlahco, which, translated from Nahuatl, means “half” or “in the middle,” a good description of the way we fold this tasty treat before eating it. The story of the taco itself begins with corn. Sometime around 3000 BCE, the indigenous people of Mexico excavated the Valle de Tehuac and hybridized grasses to create the corn plant. They would come to view corn as the foundation of humanity; indigenous cultures viewed it as the seed of life, and even believed humans were made of corn.
Corn kernels were nixtamalized with an alkaline treatment to remove the husk, then ground into a fine corn flour base, or “masa,” to make what we know as tortillas; historians date the first traces of tortillas back to the Olmec culture around 1500 BCE. It was Moctezuma who is credited with the idea of using these corn tortillas to scoop and hold his food after it had been prepared for him on a hot stone, and after Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, better known as just Cortez, overthrew the Aztec empire, he fed his soldiers banquets of corn tortillas and pork to celebrate conquering the region for Spain (though it would be a stretch to call these “tacos,” as that word simply referred to something folded).
Tacos as we know and love them burst onto the scene sometime in the 19th century in the Mexican silver mines. The first true type of taco was the taco de minero, or “miner’s taco,” and it is thought that initially this referred to gunpowder wrapped in a thin piece of paper, used to blow holes in the rock face and excavate the ore. The food, which would become a staple of the working-class, took its name from this mining practice because meats (and other things) wrapped in a tortilla resembled the explosive devices.
From there, tacos spread rapidly as they were a modestly priced meal which was very affordable, and would make their way to us in Los Angeles when the United States acquired California from Mexico as a result of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War in 1848.
It was a job shortage that caused the residents of Tlaxcala to develop the historical precursor to the taco truck. Faced with economic ruin, those out of work began preparing taco baskets. Each morning, the taqueros, as they were called, would assemble baskets full of tacos, then leave their homes by bike to pedal around the cities and towns selling them. That taco truck I loved so much was an evolutionary advance of the taco basket.
Of course no discussion of tacos can fail to mention the famous “Tacos al pastor.” These are particularly noteworthy because they mark the first time an outside culture influenced this authentically Mexican food. During the 1930s and again in the 1960s, there was a huge migration of people from Lebanon to Mexico, and as the cultures merged, so did the foods. The Taco al pastor is a middle eastern shawarma or gyro recreation adjusted for protein availability, and different marination that satisfied the western, “new world” palate.
By the early 1900s, Mexican taco carts (early 20th century taco “baskets”) lined the streets of Los Angeles, with the women running them called “chili queens.” But it wouldn’t be until 1962 when Glen Bell created Taco Bell, a chain of fast-food restaurants, that tacos went mainstream in the United States as his franchises sold them countrywide. He is credited with inventing what we call the hard shell (or crunchy) taco, likely out of necessity and practicality: hard taco “shells” had a longer shelf life than their softer tortilla counterparts, and they were easier to mass produce on the scale necessary for a fast-food establishment. Bell’s innovation was fried, hard, U-shaped shells you could instantly stuff with premade fillings to order. For a taco purist like myself, this is a sacrilege.
I have been in search of tacos that come close to those Mike and I used to get from the taco truck for the better part of my life. Last Christmas, Mike, his wife, and their son came to visit me in Palm Springs. I took them to my current favorite Mexican hole-in-the-wall in Cathedral City. We ordered tacos. When the meal was over, Mike turned to me and said:
“those tacos were taco truck worthy.”