FACT: tacos make everything better, am I right?
Unfortunately it seems that in the past and even today
people just can't really agree on what a taco is,
like this recipe for tacos with chili verde from 1831.
Are they even tacos? Well you'll just have to wait and see.
So thank you to Babbel for sponsoring this video as we celebrate and investigate
tacos, this time on Tasting History.
So what is a taco? Is it this, or this?
Or even this?
Well the answer across the board is
yes they're all tacos because the definition of taco changes from place to place and from time to time,
and the changing nature of this dish makes it so there aren't really any old recipes for tacos from Mexico,
but regardless of the definition of taco one thing that has always been true
is that tacos are a street food, and in one of Mexico's first cookbooks 'El Cocinero Mexicano' from 1831
the author does give some recipes for street foods like tostadas, chilaquiles, and quesadillas,
and says that the way that they're made can kind of be applied to a lot of other street foods,
so this is actually a recipe for a chalupa which means canoe as seen in the loteria card,
and this part of the recipe can absolutely apply to tacos.
"Chile verde. They are made with xitomate or tomato, the first roasted and the second baked:
one or the other is ground with green chili,
and they are are thrown in the center with cheese and chopped onion...
on top they are decorated with strands of fried meat and minced onion."
So we can use this as our base recipe. Now the chalupas would be fried,
and many tacos throughout history as we'll see later have also been fried but
in Mexico most often the filling is wrapped in a soft corn tortilla.
These are the type of taco that I enjoyed in my recent trip to Mexico the food was fantastic, and
I got to actually use some of the Spanish that I have learned from our sponsor Babbel.
Last month when I went to celebrate my uncle's birthday in Baja Mexico I went to the most amazing store
that had every type of tequila and mezcal you could imagine,
and while it was great to use some of the Spanish that I had learned from Babbel,
Babbel also teaches you other facts about the history and the culture of where you're going that came in really, really handy.
See Babbel is the number one language learning app in the world
and I've been able to learn Spanish through the short 10 minute lessons which are so convenient.
And while I've learned a great deal of vocabulary and grammar and how to make sure that raw onions
never appear on my tacos 'Sin ceboya' except in today's recipe of course but i'm doing that to myself.
I've also learned about Mexican food and drink so when offered el mezcal con gusano
I knew exactly what I was getting into because Babbel taught me that gusano means agave worm.
Actually if you ever get the chance to try sal de gusano or worm salt which is made with the worm
you should because it's oddly perfect for the mezcal.
So just click the link in the description to get 65% off of your subscription or just scan this QR code up in the corner.
Also while I was at that tequila shop I got the coolest bottle of tequila.
I literally bought it just because of the bottle,
They say that the tequila inside is good and i have not tried it yet so
I think I might have to try it with these tacos which we're about ready to make.
So for this recipe what you'll need is: some corn tortillas.
So I have actually made corn tortillas here on the channel before in the video on quesadillas and
I will put a link in the description if you want to learn how to make them from scratch.
1 to 2 pounds 700 grams of meat.
Now what meat you use up to you the recipe is not specific traditionally,
now it's pork, or beef, or chicken, sometimes fish
and all of those will work with this recipe. If you want to go more pre-Columbian then go with
turkey, cactus, squash, iguana, or some of the algae and many insects that live around Lake Texcoco.
Personally I'm going with beef, or carne asada, and some of the traditional flavorings or seasonings
for this are lime, cumin, garlic, and cilantro but if you have a mexican market near you
you can probably buy it pre-marinated which is actually probably going to be more traditional than making it yourself.
Then one pound or 450 grams of either green tomatoes or these tomatillo.
So these are the ones that the author says to roast
and they come with this like husk that you have to kind of take off and then it's super, super sticky so you have to wash the tomatillo.
They're a lot firmer than most tomatoes and the flavor is typically not as sweet, they're more
acidic and tangy but they they are fantastic.
1 to 4 green chilis. Now she is not specific as to which green chili to use and there are lots of green chilies available.
Something like a mild Hatch or Anaheim, or Poblano green chili, or the spicier jalapeno or serrano chili.
And now a lot of these chilies look very similar to each other and so when they are all next to each other at the grocery store
you really have to pay attention to what you're buying...
or else you might think that you're buying something very mild and instead get serrano chilies which are about 10 times
hotter than the chili that you were looking for and that's exactly what I did so
these are going to be a lot spicier than I had intended and you know that's just going to have to be how it is.
1 cup or 150 grams of queso fresco or crumbly fresh cheese, a half onion chopped,
and then you can add a little lime or cilantro at the end just to brighten up the dish.
Now first we are going to roast our tomatillo.
I am using a comal which is an earthenware griddle that has been used in Mexico
down through South America for 3000 years and they're still used today but if you don't have one of those
you can use a dry pan or a griddle or actually just roast them over an open flame.
And you can leave them whole or slice them which will save you time.
Once there's a bit of char and they get nice and soft take them off the heat and set them aside while you prepare your chilies.
Cut off the stems, then slice the chilies down the middle and remove the seeds.
You can also remove the ribs which is actually where most of the heat is, however
however don't do it with your fingers like I did.
It's not a problem if you have a not very spicy chili, and this is when I learned that I got the wrong chili
because my fingers were on fire so use a tool,
but once that's done chop them up fine and put them into a molcajete or something that you can grind them in and then add the tomatillo,
and grind everything together and depending on what chili you use you might want to add a little bit of salt
so give it a taste before moving on.
For the meat if it's well marinated you should just lay it dry on the comal or a dry pan.
If you use dry spices only then you might need a little bit of olive oil.
Now it's best if the meat is very thin so it doesn't have to stay on the stove for more than a minute or two on each side.
Once it's cooked through slice it up into thin strips and get all your fixins ready to assemble the tacos.
Now it is the taco assembly that seems to cause so much controversy.
Soft shell versus hard shell.
Onions versus lettuce.
Lettuce versus cabbage.
Chees versus no cheese.
And if you're using cheese which kind of cheese is it?
Everyone seems to have an opinion and once you're subscribed to Tasting History and you listen to the rather convoluted history of tacos
you'll realize that everyone is right,
and everyone is wrong.
So the origins of the taco are really unknown even the origin of the word is nebulous at best.
It may come from the old Nahuatl word tlacho which can mean middle or center.
Makes sense though it seems that the word was never actually used to refer to any kind of food like a taco
but there are old descriptions of foods that could have been like tacos.
When describing Aztec women making tortillas the 16th century Franciscan Friar Bernardino de Sahagún says
"She is a maker of tortillas- a tortilla maker; she makes them disc -shaped, thin, long....
she makes them into balls; twisted tortillas- twisted about chile; she uses grains of maize...
she makes cylindrical tortillas; she makes thick, coarse ones."
Cylindrical tortillas wrapped around a chili might be a taco,
and there's also a description of Aztec commoners taking one tortilla with their right hand and using it to scoop up
like a stew or a sauce and putting it into the center of another tortilla in their left hand
making a sort of wet taco.
There's also a mention of a cellar of "Folded tortillas... with turkey eggs"
which could have been a breakfast taco or maybe a breakfast burrito but again that is not what they would have called it.
So while tlacho does sound kind of like taco and the meaning could maybe
reference making a taco, sort of, the fact that it wasn't used to reference any specific food
makes it an unlikely candidate for the origin of the modern taco.
More likely the word came from French
In 1607 the French used the term to refer to the cloth plug that was used to hold the ball in place
in a firearm called an arquebus and by the 18th century Spanish dictionaries included the word as well
but it didn't mean food inside of a tortilla in fact it meant pretty much everything BUT food inside of a tortilla.
Definitions include wedge, wad, plug, billiard cue, a gulp of wine, carpenter's hammer,
blowpipe, ramrod, short stocky person, short thick piece of wood."
But nothing to do with tortillas and it likely didn't get any association with food until the 19th century,
and it didn't get a first big literary mention until 1891 in Manuel Payno's novel 'Los Bandidos de Rio Frio'.
In a scene describing the festival of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
He says "The hill and streets were covered with Indians and people from Mexico having a lunch of chito and tortillas,
drunken salsa and very good pulque... forming merry groups with a devouring appetite,
biting off the savory bits of of a roast leg of goat; and the boys jumping with their avocado tortilla tacos in hand."
But it seems that at least according to the 1898 'Diccionario de Mejicanismos'
they still weren't tacos like we would know them today but more generically
"a snack that is taken outside of meal times".
Now it's not entirely known how the word became associated with food or how it got its shape
but one theory stems from the silver mines just north of Mexico City.
See 19th century miners would take gunpowder wrapped in paper or else dynamite and plug it into a hole in the rock to blow it up,
and you may recall that back in the 18th century one of the many definitions for taco was a plug
and so they called this plug of dynamite a taco.
And one of the miners favorite snacks during the day
was a tortilla with some meat inside that was wrapped up into a roll that kind of looked like a stick of dynamite.
These they gave the name tacos de minero or miners tacos,
and they probably looked a lot more like a taquito than a taco but were at least getting in the right ballpark.
Now these tacos de minero eventually kind of changed their form and had a name change to taco sudados
or sweaty tacos. There totally could be an animated series called Taco Sudados
about a taco with severe hyperhidrosis. Cartoon Network would eat that up.
Anyway, these tacos which were filled with beans or potatoes, or chicharron or adobo, were always fried,
and they were described in 1901 by Olive Percival when she traveled to Mexico City.
"There in the gutter stands a young man of about fifteen, eating a taco which is a fried turnover filled with chopped highly seasoned meats-
I once purchased one in a briefly seductive cook shop."
And in the new animated series Taco Sudados the sweaty taco should totally work in a briefly seductive cook shop.
This thing writes itself.
Now many people today believe that since in Mexico they tend to eat their tacos soft-shelled
that the hard shell taco is an American invention,
and clearly that is not true in fact
the original tacos were hard shelled because they were deep fried
but these are the type of taco that did become popular in the US
and the first English language recipe for tacos and maybe actually the first written recipe for tacos ever
comes from the 'California Mexican-Spanish Cook Book' from 1914
and it describes a "Taco. 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."
So very different from any taco that you would get today it sounds more like it's a cross between an empanada
and an enchilada but it seems that this was the type of taco that was popular
for the first half of the 20th century at least here in the United States.
Now the modern American taco owes its invention to two people.
One was a German named William Gebhardt who moved to Texas started to go by the name Willy,
and in 1894 developed dried chili powder which allowed ground beef
to have a distinct Tex-Mex flavor all year round.
The other was a California man who came up with the pre-made shell. So instead of having to deep fry the entire taco like in Mexico City
or the early Californian recipes he was able to take the pre-made shell and put the ingredients in
after frying which helped the taco to stay crispier longer.
A couple years later he watched as Richard and Maurice McDonald made a killing when they opened a few burger joints in his neck of the woods.
Well this man Glenn Bell decided to follow their lead and
opened his own Taco-Tia in San Bernardino California in 1954.
A few years later he opened El Taco in Long Beach,
and in 1962 he decided to put his name on the place and opened the first Taco Bell in Downey California.
He quickly opened eight more restaurants, was bringing in over $50,000 dollars a year and decided to make it into a franchise.
They blew up and by 1978 Taco Bell had 868 restaurants.
Then Bell sold the company to Pepsi Cola, and a few gorditas, chalupas, and one amazing chihuahua later...
"Yo quiero Taco Bell"
and Taco Bell became responsible for bringing- I'm not going to say Mexican food,
so the idea of Mexican food to the world.
And while that taco is really no longer anything like what is eaten in Mexico today or in the past
it seems that today or in the past nobody's really been able to agree what a taco is,
and as much as I love a 2 AM Taco Bell taco or Mexican pizza back in college
I think that this recipe from 1831 might be more my taste today.
So once you have all of your ingredients prepped just warm your tortillas either on a comal or in a pan until they darken and start to blister.
Then put on a bit of salsa, cheese, onions, meat, and a little more onion and you're good to go.
And here we are tacos from 1831. Like I said I actually don't like raw onions especially on my tacos,
so usually I go "sin cebolla" but Iwill go "con cebolla" for today.
Yeah, let's do it.
It's definitely spicy,
but not as spicy as I would think.
There it is. It's coming in waves.
Okay so there is spice to it. I knew there would be but once I can get past that once my palette moves
past that um which might not be for a few hours but I can taste the tanginess of the tomatillo.
They're very, very different from from regular tomatoes and I really, really like them.
And they kind of actually it goes really well with, I hate to say it, with the raw onion.
Makes it really nice. The cheese I think I would need a lot more cheese to really even know that it's there.
There's maybe- it adds a little bit to the texture but unnecessary. The meat's fantastic.
I could just eat a bowl of this of this meat but what's really interesting
is the tortilla because it's kind of crispy on the outside because of the way that we cooked it but
then it's very soft and you know supple on the inside so you don't want to overcook them because
you do want to kind of be able to roll them up like you know the taco that you would blow up a mine with.
But now that I've had a bite of the taco I do think it is time to try this tequila
That's smooth. That's good especially for buying it
you know based on the bottle, though I guess they put good stuff in these bottles.
It's a whole thing but keeping the bottle and I'm gonna drink the tequila.
So make sure to follow me on Instagram, have a couple tacos, hard, soft, it doesn't matter
and I will see you next time on Tasting History.
Hot or not, I'm finishing them.