Posted on 05/16/2012 2:34:51 PM PDT by mojito
....There is nothing remotely Mexican about Potato Olés—not even the quasi-Spanish name, which has a distinctly Castilian accent. The burrito was more insulting to me and my heritage than casting Charlton Heston as the swarthy Mexican hero in Touch of Evil. But it was intriguing enough to take back to my hotel room for a taste. There, as I experienced all of the concoction’s gooey, filling glory while chilly rain fell outside, it struck me: Mexican food has become a better culinary metaphor for America than the melting pot.
Back home, my friends did not believe that a tater tot burrito could exist. When I showed them proof online, out came jeremiads about inauthenticity, about how I was a traitor for patronizing a Mexican chain that got its start in Wyoming, about how the avaricious gabachos had once again usurped our holy cuisine and corrupted it to fit their crude palates.
In defending that tortilla-swaddled abomination, I unknowingly joined a long, proud lineage of food heretics and lawbreakers who have been developing, adapting, and popularizing Mexican food in El Norte since before the Civil War. Tortillas and tamales have long left behind the moorings of immigrant culture and fully infiltrated every level of the American food pyramid, from state dinners at the White House to your local 7-Eleven. Decades’ worth of attempted restrictions by governments, academics, and other self-appointed custodians of purity have only made the strain stronger and more resilient. The result is a market-driven mongrel cuisine every bit as delicious and all-American as the German classics we appropriated from Frankfurt and Hamburg.
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
Then there is the “ruben sandwich”...invented in omaha nebraska.
and a lot of spanish food was actually north african arab food.
Hey, I am just sitting eating some carne sea and a bite of chiccorino but that sound ds delicious with red and yellow habeneros.
I’ll make some tomorrow and get back to you.
Tamales with the meat
I watch his show from time to time and really enjoy the educational aspect of his show.
The last one had some theme about tequila. It was interesting but I ain’t a tequila guy.
Which came via the Silk Road. There's no end to it. It recurses like a fork bomb.
Bottom line is we eat what we can get locally and adapt it to the cultural tastes we establish as children. And we always have.
What has changed is that cultural memes move much faster than they used to.
/johnny
Yep like my favorite ingredient in Paella “Saffron”. The Spaniards got it from the Moors.
Yep like my favorite ingredient in Paella “Saffron”. The Spaniards got it from the Moors.
Carne Seca
Tequila is the only alcohol known that is technically NOT classified as a depressant.
Just a little bit of trivia.
The Spanish had been in the habit of turning breeding pairs of pigs loose all up and down the coast and the consequence of that was that by the time they got around to doing something they already had cured hams ready and waiting.
Between 1598 and 1604 most of the Spanish settlers/explorers/miners moved out of this region to better pickings elsewhere. But the Indians kept on making Virginia ham for the newer settlers to come.
The midwest Vikings have this strange thing they call ‘hot dish’, and I have witnessed it being made: they take a 9X13 or bigger pan, start dumping miscellaneous freezer meats on it, then open a few cans of soup and whatnot, dump that on it, then slather it with shredded cheese and pave over with a layer of tater tots, then add foil and bake for an hour or so.
‘Hot Dish’.
Hogs are uniquely well suited to being set loose to forage in the woods, and that's what they did, regardless of how they got here, at the hands of whom. The Indians did it, the frontier English, German, Scotch-Irish and Huguenot settlers did it, the Spanish did it, it just worked for the realities of that time time and place.
I get the feeling that done right it could be pretty good, and done wrong it could call for a Nuremberg Trial.
That was a fun read.
It's recursive. It goes forever into the mists of time.
/johnny
Pretty good idea. I like it. I wonder if they scattered any seeds around too? Wild grapes? Wild barley?, turnips, wild cabbage?
dang that looks good....like a savory version of the jello desert with marshmallows on top.
Ditto from here in western Wisconsin. About twenty miles up the road near Arcadia is a chicken processing plant. A lot of the workers are Latino i.e. Mexican, and now the area has sort of a Polish/Mexican mix. I'm waiting for a Mexican restaurant to open around there to try it out.
I'm probably half way along in my search for old Spanish townsites East of the Mississippi. There are not a lot of them but they are there so somebody was doing something (I and others suspect they looked for and found gold).
Up in Canada some of the old Spanish mill sites still have stuff ~ they'd set up a mill and a run from a lake. Then they'd cut segments for segmented grinding wheels from local stone. They'd set those in a frame.
You could grind grain (provided by the Indians) and ore in the same mill (though at different times).
Some of the grain would go back to the Indians, some would go in the mash, and then you'd use a rather primitive retort (looks like a beaker on its side) to do your distillation. That would end up in the bellies of the Indians as well, and the Spaniard would get his supplies for his mining operation that way.
There are signs of comparable operations in the Eastern US as well.
One thing about a well thought out enough hunk of civilization, it will find a way to fit in ~
New Jersey's shoreline is paved over with these town sites. I suspect those were the Catholic Dutch getting a headstart on everybody else ~ they've just disappeared in our history, but the Jamestown records indicate a population of 20,000 people North of the Potomac by the early 1620s, and I don't think that's incidental. At the same time 60,000 English (et al) settlers went on to die early in Jamestown ~ usually of malaria, etc. Even Jamestown's original site disappeared into the James River ~ it was relocated just a few decades ago!
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