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For many Americans, a taco looks like this: a U-shaped deep-fried corn tortilla shell filled with seasoned ground beef, shredded iceberg lettuce, cheddar cheese, and maybe salsa or chopped tomatoes. It’s emoji-level recognizable, an ’80s and ’90s childhood staple. But the taco’s detractors have been taking aim in recent times. “A few years back, like watching a favorite childhood movie and noticing how terrible it really is, I finally realized that hard taco shells are a sham,” wrote Serious Eats food writer J. Kenji López-Alt in a 2011 post reminiscing about the less-than-stellar taco nights of his childhood. Anthony Bourdain has repeatedly lashed out at Taco Bell and Tex-Mex for sullying the true Mexican taco with dirty American ingredients. 

Like General Tso’s chicken or a meatball parm sandwich, it seems logical that the American taco has no real relationship to its original culture. A carnitas taco served on a paper plate in Mexico City—that’s authentic. A ground beef taco served by a Taco Bell in Indianapolis, well, that’s something else. Something worse.

But where did the American taco really come from? And what does it say about us?

First of all, it’s a mistake to believe that the iconic hard shell taco is something that clueless white people invented. “Both Americans and Mexicans would love to believe that the hard-shell taco was a travesty of an invention by clueless gabachos. But that’s simply not the case,” says Gustavo Arellano, perhaps America’s foremost scholar on the taco. Arellano is the writer behind the advice column “Ask A Mexican,” the author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, and also the editor of the OC Weekly newspaper in his native Orange County, California.

“Mexicans have been eating what we now call tacos since time immemorial,” says Arellano. “The idea of stuffing something into a tortilla—we’ve been doing that since there were tortillas, so we’re talking thousands of years ago.” But Mexican cuisine is incredibly regional, being almost as varied in climate and geography as the U.S., from deserts in the north to the tropics in the south, the Sierra Madre mountain range in the west to central valleys. And Mexican cuisine is a product of varied influences the same way American cuisine is; the many different Indian populations; the Spanish conquest; waves of immigrants from North, South, and (especially recently) Central America; French, German, and Jewish immigrants from Europe during World War II; Lebanese and other Arab immigrants who brought meat-on-a-spit traditions.

All of these blended together and were filtered through the ingredients that people had at hand. There are old ways of doing things, and newer ways. But they’re all Mexican, and for Arellano, “good” and “bad” are largely unrelated to “old” and “new.” The term “authentic” is entirely meaningless.

Tacos, says Arellano, were until the 1800s generally more popular in central and southern Mexico, where more common fillings would be pork, chicken, seafood, or vegetables. But the taco’s popularity increased in the 19th century in the north, and northern Mexicans had a different meat of choice. “All of northern Mexico is beef country,” says Arellano. “Sonora, Baja California, Nuevo Leon, Chihuahua, that’s where beef is king.” That was as true north of the border as south. “Putting a whole bunch of ground beef on a flour tortilla is a cowboy tradition,” says Robb Walsh, a Galveston-based food writer and authority on all things Texas, from barbecue to Tex-Mex. (He also, coincidentally, went to the same elementary school as Arellano before moving back to Texas.)

There are a few different types of beef tacos; carne asada, grilled hunks of beef, is most common, but lengua, tongue, along with a few other offal cuts especially from around the cow’s head are also easy to find. Ground beef, though, of the type you’d find in Taco Bell? That would be most recognizable in northern Mexico as picadillo.

Picadillo is a dish consisting primarily of minced or ground meat and is found in pretty much every country Spain ever had a hand in, from Mexico to Cuba to the Philippines. It varies from country to country and region to region; in Caribbean cuisines, especially Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican, it’s often cooked with raisins and olives and served with rice. In Mexico it varies in form, sometimes served as a soup, sometimes cooked with less liquid with potatoes (sort of like a hash), and sometimes even drier and less saucy and served in a taco.

Crispy tacos, too, exist perfectly authentically, whatever that means, in Mexico, and have for quite a long time. Sometimes they’re called tacos dorados, or golden tacos, and if the taco is first rolled into a cigar shape before frying can be called a taquito or sometimes a flauta, depending on size or just local terminology. “They’re often made with potatoes and eaten during lent,” says Arellano. The main differences between tacos dorados and a Taco Bell taco is that the filling may be slightly different, and will be fried to order (and sometimes fried whole) rather than placed in a pre-fried shell. But really, they’re not all that different.

In 1914, the recipe widely cited as the earliest known recipe for tacos was published, by Bertha Haffner-Ginger in a book called California Mexican-Spanish Cookbook. Her recipe describes the taco as follows:

“Made by putting chopped cooked beef and chile sauce in tortilla made of meal and flour; folded, edges sealed together with egg; fried in deep fat, chile sauce served over it.”

This would not easily recognizable as a taco today; I think most would identify this dish as an empanada. But the parts are all there, setting the stage for Old El Paso and Taco Bell.

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SOURCE: Atlas Obscura
Dan Nosowitz