Consider National Taco Day, October 4 every year, a concentrated and intensified version of the “Taco Tuesdays” many restaurants offer in a bid to bring in Happy Hour-like crowds. Come to think of it, to further whet your appetite for the subject, get this: the phrase “Taco Tuesday” was actually trademarked across the country in 1989 by a Wyoming-based fast-food chain called Taco John’s, except in New Jersey, where the trademark had already been claimed by Gregory’s Restaurant & Bar back in ‘82.
However, nobody needs to worry about the legality of what their dinner is called. On National Taco Day, we only need to grab some tortillas and stuff them with savory fillings, from the traditional carne asada, cheese, tomato, lettuce and sour cream, to more exotic gustatory delights like fish, chorizo, even tongue, to name only a few of the “meat component” alternatives. Even the word “stuff” is no accident; many believe that the word taco derives from the Spanish “ataco,” meaning “to stuff.”
The anthropologist and historian Arturo Warman (1937 — 2003) specialized in prehistoric Mexican culture for much of his career, and was cited as saying that it was the Aztecs and Mayans who hybridized wild grasses beginning around 3,000 BC to produce the large, nutritious kernels we now know as corn. At National Today, we feel fine marking that time as the true beginning of the taco as a foodstuff, because the corn tortilla became such a versatile part of Mexican cuisine so quickly, spreading far and wide and only increasing in the number of its aficionados, some of whose descendants are of course the taco-loving foodies of today.
We’re not sure if the calendar day was October 4 that conquistador Hernando Cortez mentioned the native flatbread “tlaxcalli” in a letter to Spain’s King Charles V, but the year was 1520 and it was then that Cortez and his fellows dubbed the food “tortilla.”
From that point forward, it was inevitable that advances in both culinary science and communications would bring the taco exploding onto dining-room tables across the globe. By 1914, Californian cookbooks had begun to include taco recipes. In the following decades, the taco has fully lived up to its definition (akin to the generic term “sandwich”) and became nearly ubiquitous. We don’t have a single complaint.
