By Abe Villarreal
When I order an iced latte no flavor each morning at the local hotel café, I usually get a question confirming my selection. "No flavor?" It's one of those questions asked in a way to ensure that I made the right choice.
In actuality, I think coffee with milk and ice has a lot of flavor. Mostly coffee flavor. That's the way I like it. Adding a dash of syrup, or a spray of whip cream feels like something is getting in the way. I like coffee to taste like coffee.
When it comes to food, the purity of the taste, or of the way it looks, always appeals to me, and in our country, our American way of life, purity is not something we want in food. We like sour cream to cover our entire taco or enchilada. We want a thick layer of cheese on top of almost anything. We use terms like smothered and it makes us feel like when something is smothered that it is blanketed with endless extra flavor.
I want to know what's underneath. Often, it's the tortilla that an older lady spent hours making. Adding salt, lard, water. Mixing, stretching, tossing. She doesn't change her ways and she doesn't measure anymore because she knows exactly what it takes to have that tortilla taste just right. She makes them every morning before the other cooks arrive.
Other times it's the chicken filling that has been stewing in a pot. Only a few ingredients were thrown in with the chicken to get it to the flavor everyone expects. Onion, garlic, salt, pepper. A little more of this and a little more of that. Then the hand shredding begins.
If you're lucky, you can taste it when it's in a large bowl, hand shredded and still hot. When you do, you would never want to cover it with a gunk of sauce or a splat of cream.
Where I live, in the borderlands, there is sometimes a dancing of two different Mexican cultures, and sometimes a conflict when they both meet. The south side of the border lets food be food. A taco has meat, a corn tortilla, and salsa as topping. The only question you get asked is if you would like verdudas (vegetables). This means they will either add cabbage or an onion and cilantro mixture. It's as pure as it can get.
On the north side of the border, a taco comes with meat, often a fried hard-shell tortilla, lettuce, tomato, shredded cheese, and if you are a little too north of the border, sour cream. When a restaurant is feeling like they are treating you extra nice, they even offer you guacamole to throw on top.
The taco becomes challenging to eat. The hard-shell tortilla crumbles. The extra topping squeeze out of each end. You have a mess of something. It might taste good, and I have had a few of these that have great flavor, but the purity is gone.
There is something that drives countries, places, that have less in abundance, to serve you purity on a plate. Places like ours, rich places where more is better, serve you everything on a plate. It gets piled high and too much is never too much. Something gets lost under the pile of all those extras.
I like my tacos simple. Homemade corn tortilla with the kind of smell that makes you want it to eat it alone or with a dab of butter. Meat that's been simmering in the kinds of spices you know don't come out of a plastic shaker. Salsa that brings together a few diced up veggies, a couple of cut up chiles, and a squirt of lime. Freshness, heat, and tang in a bite.
If you mix together only what you need and you make it the way it has been made since you can remember, you'll get exactly what you expect.
Pure and simple.
Abe Villarreal writes about life and culture in America. He can be reached at abevillarreal@hotmail.com.