|
If you can find Ortega’s Red Bell Pepper Taco Shells*, you can make Valentine Tacos (photo #1).
Or, arrange conventional tacos in a heart shape (photo #2).
In either case, top Valentine tortillas with your favorite red garnishes, such as:
Bell pepper
Onion
Radish
Tomato
Top fish tacos with rosy pink imitation crab leg (photo #3)—or real crab, if you’re flush.
While many people enjoy tacos with a soft tortilla shell, for others the crunch of a hard shell is part of the taco experience.
The hard shells are simply a soft tortilla folded into a taco shape, then fried until golden and hardened. (The hard, pre-fried corn tortilla shell is not authentic, but created in the U.S.A. See the history below.
TORTILLA HISTORY
Tortillas, a flatbread, have been a staple in Mexico for thousands of years. They were eaten plain as well as a to hold cooked foods.
The oldest-known tortillas date back to approximately 10,000 B.C.E., made of the local staple food, corn.†
Many thousands of years later, in 1519, Hernán Cortés and his Spanish troops arrived in the Aztec empire (modern-day Mexico) and noted that the locals ate “flat corn bread.”
The Aztec name for the flatbread is tlaxcalli (tlox-cah-YEE); the Mexicans used the name tortilla, “little cake.”
The original tortilla was made from nixtamalized‡ maize/corn flour. However, today’s tortillas are commonly made from less nutritious, less flavorful wheat flour. Wheat is easier to work with.
While maize/corn tortillas have a heartier texture, flavor and better nutrition, the gluten in wheat flour tortillas enables them to be made larger and thinner without breaking.
By the same token, corn tortillas they can be gluten free, depending on the manufacturer (Mission tortillas are gluten free).
SUrprisingly, the Aztecs did not invent the taco; nor did anyone else, until it was created as a convenience food in the 18th century.
According to Professor Jeffrey M. Pilcher, author of Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food, tacos are not an ancient food.
Rather, as he discusses in an article in Smithsonian Magazine, Mexican silver miners in the 1700s likely invented the taco as a hand-held convenience food.
This new approach to tortillas was followed by taco carts and taquerías in working-class neighborhoods.
As the taco spread throughout Mexico, each region added its own touches: different meats, spices, salsas, garnishes.
Mexican Americans in the Southwest reinvented the tacos in their neighborhoods. As late as the 1960s, tacos were virtually unknown outside Mexico and the American Southwest.
But in 1962, California businessman Glen Bell founded Taco Bell as a drive-up with a few outdoor tables. It grew into a mass-marketing powerhouse, serving an Anglo version with a hard shell at quick-service restaurants nationwide.
|
