|
 Early
history of the taco
- In northern Mexico and much of the United States, tortilla means
the flour version.
Flour tortillas are the foundation of Mexican border cooking and
a relatively recent import. Their popularity was driven by the
low cost of inferior grades of flour provided to border markets
and by their ability to keep and ship well.
3000 B.C. - Excavations in the valley of “Valle
de Tehuacán”, in the state of Puebla, revealed the
use, for more than seven thousand years, of the basic cereal by
excellence of the Mesoamerican diet, a little wild cob that along
with roots and fruit was a complement for hunting. According to
Agustín Gaytán, chef and Mexican cuisine historian,
in a Greeley Tribune newspaper article: Sometime about 3000 B.C.,
people of the Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico hybridized wild
grasses to produce large, nutritious kernels we know as corn.
Mexican anthropologist and maize historian Arturo Warman credits
the development of corn with the rise of Mesoamerican civilizations
such as the Mayans and the Aztecs, which were advanced in art,
architecture, math and astronomy. The significance of corn was
not lost on indigenous cultures that viewed it as a foundation
of humanity. It is revered as the seed of life. According to legend,
human beings were made of corn by the Gods." By the time
Spaniards reached the shores of what is now Mexico in the 1400s,
indigenous Mesoamericans had a sophisticated and flavorful cuisine
based on native fruits, game, cultivated beans and corn and domesticated
turkeys.
1519 - When Hernán Cortés (1485-1547),
also known as Hernando Cortez, and his conquistadores arrived
in the New World on April 22, 1519, they discovered that the inhabitants
(Aztecs Mexicas) made flat corn breads. The native Nahuatl name
for these was tlaxcalli. The Spanish gave them the name tortilla.
In Cortés' 1920 second letter to King Charles V of Spain,
he describes the public markets and the selling of maize or Indian
corn: This city has many public squares, in which are situated
the markets and other places for buying and selling. . . where
are daily assembled more than sixty thousand souls, engaged in
buying and selling; and where are found all kinds of merchandise
that the world affords, embracing the necessaries of life, as
for instance articles of food. . . maize or Indian corn, in the
grain and in the form of bread, preferred in the grain for its
flavor to that of the other islands and terra-firma.
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