The Taco Variety That’s Uncommon In Mexico
It’ll be hard to find someone that doesn’t love tacos. There’s even a book entitled Everyone Loves Tacos and a holiday in both the U.S and Mexico (per Sprout Social). Tacos are originally from Mexico (per Twisted Taco), but Americans can be oddly proprietary of them because most of us have been eating them all our lives. For some, a taco is made in a hard shell — a crisp, V-shaped corn tortilla — which many think of as more authentic than soft flour, right?
It’s true that in much of Mexico, corn is the tortilla of choice. Corn masa is used to make a wide variety of shapes as vehicles for luscious toppings and fillings. Sopes, huaraches, and tetales just to name a few. Of course, there are also tamales and tostadas. It’s likely tacos dorado (golden tacos) were the inspiration for the hard-shell taco. They are deep-fried tacos, and yet, are not the same as a tortilla fried crisp and then filled. Tostadas, though not a taco, are a closer version of the curious form in question.
So where did this hard-shelled style of taco originate? Surely our beloved crunchy shell is not the invention of a fast food chain. As is often the case, there’s more than one story. Gustavo Arellano, author of “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America,” tells El Paso Inc. that in 1932, George N. Ashley founded the Texas-based Ashley’s brand Mexican food and geared his canned Mexican foods and restaurant menu to Texans. He believed most of his consumers wouldn’t be comfortable with the sanitation standards of local Mexican restaurants, some of which still had dirt floors. By the mid-1930s and over a decade before the first deep-fryer of patented, George created a device that could produce 600 hard shells an hour.
BBC informs us that in 1937, Salvador and Lucia Rodriguez served hard shell tacos from their restaurant Milta Cafe in San Bernardino. Glen Bell had a burger joint across from Milta, where he had the epiphany of marketing tacos outside the Mexican community. He opened Taco Tia, El Taco, and then Taco Bell. Though Bell may not have been the first to make a hard-shell taco, it has become the place we most associate with the particularly American version of a taco. But don’t get your hopes up if you’re in Mexico and want a little taste of home because a hard-shell ground beef taco will be tough to find. Fortunately, there will be a few other options.
