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 ...
Mexican food in this country has nothing to do with anybody coming across the border. The vast majority of the food you’ll see on a Mexican restaurant menu was invented in America. It’s American food using a handful of base ingredients and spices that are popular in Mexico in a way not used at all in Mexico.
And as for illegals in a the kitchen that’s ALL restaurants. The best French chefs in this country have been Mexican for almost 20 years.
You need to ask for picadillo if you want ground beef. I really prefer barbacoa.
It used to be that what in California are called burritos were called burros in Arizona. However, burros seem to have been disappearing from Arizona menus.
Why?
From the right has come the canard that the cuisine is unhealthy and alien, a stereotype dating to the days of the Mexican-American War, when urban legend had it that animals wouldn’t eat the corpses of fallen Mexican soldiers due to the high chile content in the decaying flesh. Noah Smithwick, an observer of the aftermath of the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, claimed “the cattle got to chewing the bones [of Mexican soldiers], which so affected the milk that residents in the vicinity had to dig trenches and bury them.”
Uhm, Bull Shiite. Mexican Food is actually delicious and nutritious so I don’t know what you are talking about here. In regards to keeping the chile they make for themselves so as not to torch a gringo’s toungue, I actually ask for their stuff. You can’t make it hot enough for me. Hell, I eat Habaneros raw. Think I’ll do that now.
Similar knocks against Mexican food can be heard to this day in the lurid tourist tales of “Montezuma’s Revenge” and in the many food-based ethnic slurs still in circulation: beaner, greaser, pepper belly, taco bender, roach coach, and so many more. “Aside from diet,” the acclaimed borderlands scholar Américo Paredes wrote in 1978, “no other aspect of Mexican culture seems to have caught the fancy of the Anglo coiner of derogatory terms for Mexicans.”
Well, the terms are of endearment, then again, I am in California.
On Friday I am going to have usual bowl of Menudo from my favorite “Mexican Restaurant”.
I may even stop on the way home here in a bit and pick up some Sangre’.
And I had Tamales I bought from the gal(a loncheras) who shows up in our local Safeway the other night. They are so good!
As for Quesadillas, when I was growing up we made them all the time. I never knew they had a name until I went to a restaurant in my 20’s and friends ordered them.
“But when culinary anthropologists like Bayless and Diana Kennedy make a big show out of protecting “authentic’ Mexican food from the onslaught of commercialized glop, they are being both paternalistic and ahistorical. “
Baloney, Bayless explains ingredients and where they came from. Like Pineapple. It’s not a Hawaiian fruit but a Mexican fruit. Same with Tomatoes and several other foods that a friend who teaches Mexican and Mayan history at the University of Washington informed me of.
And Del Taco....BLOWS!
The other night I went and saw Millionaire Quartet, a story a famed evening when Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins sang together for the one and only time. Terrific show.
Afterwards we went to Mexcal, a restaurant known for its Oaxcan cuisine. I had some chipoline(grasshoppers). They are sauteed in lemon and garlic. So Good!
For dinner I had the Grilled Sea Bass over a Spinach, grilled corn, bits of bacon and cherry tomatoes. You would find something like this in a few restaurants in Puerto Aventura or even a Lobster burrito with whatever type of mole’ they made. Yummm!
But the best places for Mexican food are holes in the wall and the place where I will eat the menudo must have a name I just don’t know it and I have been going there for about 10 years.
1. A pizza in Paris (” Did they just plop an egg on that?”)
2. A lasagna in Landstuhl (Germany)
The egg thing really surprised me also. Have to learn to order one without the egg.
Any Southern Italian food in Japan was completely tasteless. I guess once any new country puts their twist on others food, it's bound to suck.
Everything. Hamburgers, hot-dogs, mac and cheese, everything.
/johnny
That's got to be the silliest thing I have ever seen you type bcsco.
Tex-Mex food is about as Mexican as french fries are French.
“tater tot burrito”
Sounds like hash browns-in-a-blanket. Just saying. I’d try it.
The secrets are: (1) LARD, and (2) Freshness.
bookmarkito
Yahoo concurs:
http://news.yahoo.com/who-knew/american-food-the-foreign-origins-of-many-u-s-favorites-29306821.html
A funny coincidence of an article to come across 5 minutes after this thread.
It's probably an obvious application given cornmeal ground to a specific grain size. I've imagined Columbus and his crew making a batch on the way back home.
“A pizza in Paris (” Did they just plop an egg on that?”)”
We experienced that in Belgium - we had to slide it off, scrape, dap with a napkin, and then procede. We learned to read the menu more carefully after that; pizza + œuf is bad.
On a different note, we used to get pretty decent hard tacos just outside Futenma MCAS on Okinawa.
You cannot duplicate wheat bread with any kind of corn flour, but you can make things that are just as delicious, and hot every single time.
MY recipe for a few corn fritters is 1/4 cup of masa, 1/8 cup of gluten free Bisquick (to which I add another teaspoon of baking powder), and 1/8 cup of any kind of gluten free pancake mix ~ sometimes I double the recipe and add a can of corn.
You can add peppers if you want.
The way you cook these is get a skillet. Put in the oil. Pour in enough batter to cover the bottom. Cook it about 3 minutes on a side ~ or the same way you would any pancake.
Set it aside to solidify.
Takes about 10 minutes!
I've been cutting these cakes into quadrants. The other day I took a corn pancake, put some cream cheese on a quadrant, then put on some more cream cheese and another quadrant. And so on until I had a stack. Then poured on some sugar free gluten free maple flavored syrup, and some fresh mixed chopped fruit.
That was a diabetics night cap ~ half hour later it put me to sleep. Must remember to use more insulin next time!
I've done pretty much the same thing with a thinner batter that gives me wraps. Cook up some shrimp. Spice them with some scotch bonnets ~ be careful as you chop 'em up. These puppies can numb your hand, and your eyeballs! Put the spiced shrimp on half the pancake. Flop the other side over it ~ should look like a cheaply made omlette. Now, take it out of the skillet and put it on a paper plate (so it doesn't cool down so fast). Pour on some fresh homemade salsa.
Eat!
Corn on the cob?
Arellano is a Lefty whose column runs in the local free weekly. Having said that, I’ve had “real” Mexican food and I prefer our Tex-Mex or what I cook myself.
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