Books: José R. Ralat’s American Tacos
Books
What’s a Taco?
American Tacos: A History and Guide by José R. Ralat, 280 pages, University of Texas Press, hardcover, $26.95 (2020).
In American Tacos, José R. Ralat, a food writer and former author of the Taco Trail blog, diagnoses the migration of his subject through the United States, noting that the evolution of the American taco “is fueled by regional population shifts, ingredient market availability, and culinary adaptation.” Thus, the book’s focus is “taco styles, charting the stories of tacos through places and people.”
Ralat blends archival research and on-the-ground reporting to give a thorough accounting of the people who make tacos, their sometimes-bygone restaurants, and their evolving taco creations in chapters including: San Antonio-style puffy tacos; Texas and southern barbecue tacos; Korean tacos (or K-Mex) of Los Angeles and beyond; Jewish and kosher tacos of L.A., New York, and Miami; and modern, chef-driven tacos. He doesn’t shy away from addressing the socio-political issues of “corporate cultural appropriation and cheffy dreams masquerading as innovation,” such as in an excellent passage on star South Carolinian chef Sean Brock’s taqueria, Minero, “a name that takes, I think, a white man a whole bunch of cojones to use.” (Whether meant intentionally or not, the name can be read to refer to — and thus commandeer — the original food to bear the name “taco.”)
The subject of the opening chapter — the breakfast taco, a perfect food alongside a mug of black coffee — is dear to my heart, as I grew up in Austin, Texas, eating them for a dollar each. Ralat settles a score. San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley, not Austin, are the real birthplaces of the American breakfast taco, while Austin is its “Madison Avenue, its ad agency.” But Austin’s robust scene gets a lengthy account — full of taco entrepreneurs and their current and former restaurants, archival news research — and finally observes the breakfast taco’s recent migrations to cities such as Chicago, New York, Denver, and Los Angeles.
Much of this work is definitive and therefore a valuable resource. Some basic taco questions — what is its origin? how did the flour vs. corn tortilla rivalry occur?— are not answered centrally, but rather more obscurely inside various regional chapters. While Ralat does his best to include colorful details of myriad tacos and the places and people that served them, I found myself wanting a more passionate, dripping, hunger-inducing account of the experience of eating tacos and being in the places from which they come. That may be the fault of my own misplaced expectations. Ralat resists the role of the critic and retains a more academic focus — as befits a book from the University of Texas Press — reminding us that the intended place for this small, dense guide is the bedside table or the glove compartment rather than the kitchen shelf. ●
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