Taco

• 1. Introduction

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  In 2024, El Califa de León in Mexico City became the first taco stand to win a Michelin star.

  The taco itself is a small, hand-sized tortilla made of corn or wheat. A filling goes on top, the tortilla folds around it, and the whole thing is eaten by hand. Fillings range across beef, pork, chicken, seafood, beans, vegetables and cheese. Garnishes include salsa, guacamole, sour cream, lettuce, coriander, onion, tomatoes and chiles. Tacos belong to the antojitos, Mexico's street food, which has spread around the world.

  Yet no one can say for certain where the dish began, or even where its name comes from. Was the word a miner's term, a Nahuatl word, or something else? Did Europeans taste the first taco, or did people in the Valley of Mexico get there first? And how did a Mexico City street snack turn into a fast-food chain, a Navajo gathering staple and a Black American cooking tradition?

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• 2. A Word With Many Meanings

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  The Real Academia Española, publisher of the Diccionario de la Lengua Española, lists the folded-tortilla dish as only one sense of the word taco. Other senses include a wedge, a plug, a billiard cue, a blowpipe and a ramrod. The word can also describe a short, stocky person or a short, thick piece of wood. The dictionary treats the tortilla meaning as a Mexican innovation. The root of the word is Germanic, with relatives in the French word tache and the English word tack.

  In Spain, tacos de jamón are diced pieces of ham, sometimes the shavings left over when a larger cut is sliced. They are served alone as tapas or street food. They also go into salmorejo, omelettes, stews, empanadas and melón con jamón.

  One theory ties the Mexican culinary term to silver miners. They used taco to mean a plug, because their explosive charges came in plug form, with gunpowder inside a paper wrapper.

  Indigenous roots have been proposed as well. The Nahuatl word tlahco means half or in the middle, which could describe food placed in the middle of a tortilla. Pre-Columbian society also knew dishes similar to the taco, and the Nahuatl word tlaxcalli names a type of corn tortilla.

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• 3. Disputed Beginnings

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  Anthropological evidence suggests that people living in the lake region of the Valley of Mexico traditionally ate tacos filled with small fish. Those who read the evidence this way argue that the taco predates the Spanish arrival in Mexico.

  A rival camp argues that the dish is far more recent. One of the more popular theories in that camp places its invention among silver miners in the 18th century.

  The older claim has a famous witness. Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote in the time of the Spanish conquistadors, and he documented the first taco feast enjoyed by Europeans. Hernán Cortés arranged the meal for his captains in Coyoacán.

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• 4. Paper Trail

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  In 1836, Antonia Carrillo published a cookbook titled Nuevo y sencillo arte de cocina, reposteria y refrescos. One recipe, for a rolled pork loin called lomo de cerdo enrollado, tells readers to roll the loin as they would a taco de tortilla, a tortilla taco. It is one of the oldest known mentions of the term.

  Manuel Payno's 1861 novel El hombre de la situación offers an early scene. A family gathers around the father's bed, where a pillow across his legs serves as a table. The mother enters last, waving a large cup of white atole in one hand. In the other she carries a tortilla taco spread with red chile, raised to her mouth.

  That passage disproves a claim that the first Mexican mention of the word came in Payno's 1891 novel Los bandidos de Río Frío.

  The word taco was regional, belonging to Mexico City and the area around it. In Guanajuato, Guerrero, Michoacán and San Luis Potosí, people said burrito or burro. In Yucatán and Quintana Roo, the word was codzito, also spelled coçito. Mexico City's cultural influence made taco the default, and the other terms faded or came to mean something different. Today a burrito is often much larger than a taco and is rolled rather than folded.

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• 5. Fire, Steam And Lard

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  Tacos al pastor, meaning shepherd style, also go by tacos de adobada and tacos árabes. Thin pork steaks are seasoned with adobo, skewered and overlapped on a vertical rotisserie. They are flame-broiled as the spit turns, much like shawarma. The style has roots in Mexico's Lebanese immigrant population.

  Tacos de asador, the spit or grill tacos, cover several meats. There is carne asada, tripe grilled until crisp, and chorizo asado, a Spanish-style sausage. Each is served on two overlapped small tortillas, sometimes with guacamole, salsa, onions and cilantro. A grilled sandwich version puts meat between two tortillas with Oaxaca-style cheese. In the northern states it is called a mulita, or little mule. In the south it is a gringa, made with wheat flour tortillas.

  Tacos sudados, the sweaty tacos, get their name from a basket. Soft tortillas filled with a spicy meat mixture are packed under a cloth. The cloth holds in warmth and traps steam, which softens them.

  Beside the plate, taco stands often set out whole or sliced red radishes, lime slices and salt. Pickled or grilled chilis come too, along with the occasional cucumber slice or grilled cambray onion.

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• 6. Coast, Crunch And Broth

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  Baja California is the birthplace of tacos de pescado, the fish taco. Grilled or fried fish sits on a corn or flour tortilla with lettuce or cabbage, pico de gallo, and a sour cream or citrus-mayonnaise sauce. In the United States, the Rubio's fast-food chain first popularized them. They remain most popular in California, Colorado and Washington. California street vendors often top them with cabbage and a coleslaw dressing. Tacos de camarones, the shrimp tacos, also began in Baja California and share the same accompaniments, plus avocado.

  Tacos dorados, or golden tacos, go by the names flautas and taquitos. The name flauta, meaning flute, comes from the elongated shape. The tortillas are filled with pre-cooked shredded chicken, beef or barbacoa, rolled into a cylinder and deep-fried until crisp. Some cooks use a microwave oven or a broiler instead.

  Tacos de birria are made with goat or beef, roasted or stewed with spices. They are typically served with the broth from the cooking as a dipping sauce. Birria comes from the Mexican state of Jalisco, and a 1925 article in the El Paso Herald mentioned it. In 2018, the taqueria El Remedio in San Antonio began offering birria de res tacos in their current form. Taco stands in California and across the Southwest United States followed at about the same time.

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• 7. The Hard Shell Era

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  By the late 1930s, Ashley Mexican Food and Absolute Mexican Foods were selling appliances and ingredients for cooking hard-shell tacos. The first patents for hard-shell cooking appliances were filed in the 1940s.

  The hard-shell or crispy taco developed in the United States. It is typically a crisp-fried corn tortilla filled with seasoned ground beef, cheese and lettuce. Tomato, onion, salsa, sour cream and avocado or guacamole sometimes join in. Restaurants and fast food chains sell it, and supermarkets stock kits for making it at home. In Spanish it is sometimes called tacos dorados, a name it shares with taquitos.

  Various sources credit different individuals with inventing it. All of them seem to have been reproducing a dish that already existed. From the early twentieth century, several kinds of tacos grew popular in the US, especially in Texas and California. The first US-published cookbook with a hard-shell recipe was The Good Life: New Mexican food, by Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert. It came out in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1949.

  In the mid-1950s, Glen Bell opened Taco Tia in southern California. He sold a simplified version of the tacos he found at Mexican restaurants in San Bernardino. His model was especially the tacos dorados at the Mitla Cafe, owned by Lucia and Salvador Rodriguez, across the street from another of his restaurants. Bell later ran several restaurants, four of them called El Taco. For many Anglo Americans, his tacos were a first introduction to Mexican food.

  Bell sold the El Taco restaurants to his partner and built the first Taco Bell in Downey in 1962. Two years later he began selling franchises, and by 1967 the chain had 100 locations.

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• 8. Puffy, Soft And Packaged

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  Henry's Puffy Tacos, opened by Henry Lopez in San Antonio, Texas, popularized a variation that has been loved in the Lower Rio Grande Valley since at least the late 1930s. Uncooked corn tortillas, flattened balls of masa dough, are quickly fried in hot oil until they expand and turn puffy. Fillings resemble those of the hard-shell version. His brother Arturo Lopez opened Arturo's Puffy Taco in Whittier, California, not long after. Restaurants serving the style have since appeared in other Texas cities too, and Henry's continues to thrive under the family's second generation.

  Traditionally, a soft-shell taco is a corn tortilla cooked to a softer state, usually by grilling or steaming. More recently the term has grown to include wheat flour tortilla tacos, mostly from large manufacturers and restaurant chains. Those are filled with the same ingredients as a hard taco.

  Grocery and convenience stores sell kits of taco shells, corn tortillas already fried in a U-shape, with a seasoning mix and taco sauce. Soft taco kits swap in tortillas for the shells.

  Then there is the tacodilla, which places melted cheese between two folded tortillas and so resembles a quesadilla.

  Austin, Texas, has been claimed as the home of the breakfast taco, a Tex-Mex dish of soft corn or flour tortilla filled with meat, eggs or cheese. Gustavo Arellano, editor at OC Weekly, answered that such a claim reflects a common trend of "whitewashed" reporting on foodways. He noted that in predominantly Hispanic San Antonio, people never needed to brag about it. They simply call it breakfast.

  Indian tacos, also called Navajo tacos, use frybread instead of tortillas. They are commonly eaten at pow-wows, festivals and other gatherings by and for indigenous people in the United States and Canada. This kind of taco is not known to have existed in the Southwestern United States before Europeans arrived. Navajo tradition says frybread came into use in the 1860s, when the government forced the tribe to leave its Arizona homeland on the journey known as the Long Walk of the Navajo. It was made from ingredients the government supplied, because the region could not support the crops the Navajo had grown before.

  Black tacos, also called Black people tacos, use ingredients traditionally linked to African-American cooking. They turn up in multiple cities across the United States and grew from the historical closeness between Black and Latino neighborhoods. Fillings include oxtail, ground turkey, fried chicken and pork chops. Where a Mexican taco often relies on sauce, the Black taco puts its emphasis on seasoning the filling itself, with more influence from African-American cuisine. Taylor Mason, owner of Taylor's Tacos in Chicago, says, "Tacos are not traditionally Black, but our preparation is Black: slow-cooked with cayenne and garlic powder, not oregano and chilies." Her kitchen braises meats instead of searing them. For diners who skip meat, the fillings turn to black-eyed peas or sweet potatoes.

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