In today's NYTimes, an article about tacos by Mark Bittman attempts to explain Mexican food thusly: Just about anything can be called a taco, which essentially means “sandwich.” You take a tortilla and you put some stuff in it and you eat it; that’s a taco. (If you roll the tortilla, it’s a burrito, which appears to have been created in the American Southwest; if you layer food on top of it, it’s an enchilada; if you crisp it up and use it as a kind of plate, it’s a tostada; if you cut it into pieces and bake or fry it, it’s a chip; and so on.
To create an aura of cred, he then namedrops the front lines of Mexican food he's been to, like "taco trucks in Los Angeles". Well as someone who grew up in Los Angeles and knows those taco trucks very well, I have a problem with his definitions.
Note that none of what I'm about ot say applies to Tex-Mex cooking. Tex-Mex is another world unto itself that has some commonalities with the food I knew in the heavily Chicano east side of Los Angeles and a lot of differences. I am only talking about the Mexican food I grew up on, the Mexican food my Mexican friends ate, too, though of course their home cuisines were more expansive. About the only thing Mark and I agree on are the chips.
So let me set the record straight.
No, Mark, not just about anything can be called a taco. A taco is a corn tortilla folded in half and eaten vertically, with layers of stuffing, generally a meat at the bottom, vegetation above, then salsa. The tortilla is always corn, and it is either warmed and generally served two-ply or single and fried crisp. It is not a flour tortilla--if you want your taco made with a flour tortilla, go to Taco Bell and order a "soft taco". The meat filling might be fish, beef, carnitas (pork), chicken or tongue. When I was a child, a taco was always crisp. The soft corn versions were probably around, but they didn't exist in any of the many so-called 'better' Mexican restaurants I ever ate at as a kid. I had to start buying at taco trucks to find those. In recent years the push toward healthier eating means we see fewer fried tortilla shells and more of the Baja/Ensenada style of fish and other seafood fillings.
A burrito is not made by merely rolling the same tortilla you'd otherwise make a taco with, as he implies. A burrito is made with a large flour tortilla that is folded ('rolled' is an insufficient and misleading verb) around a filling made variously of meat, salad stuff, rice and or beans.
This one leaves me gasping it's so wrong: "if you layer food on top of it, it’s an enchilada". NO NO NO. An enchilada is a corn tortilla (again, type of tortilla is very important, they're not interchangeable) stuffed with (typically) your choice of beef, chicken or my favorite plain cheese and onion, rolled and then baked under a chile sauce.
Then the tostada: "if you crisp it up and use it as a kind of plate, it’s a tostada," he said. Well, yes and no. Again, tortilla's important and this will be corn, and it will be crisped and topped with layers of things starting with beans which are the glue to which everything else sticks. Meat is superfluous, though it's more common now than it was in my childhood to include it. It's basically an open-faced bean taco.
Are all East Coasters as unclear about what is proper Mexican-American food as Mark Bittman?
I don't think you were clumsy, I think I just read too fast.