"Ugly Delicious" -- New Netflix Series

David Chang and friends make a freewheeling tour of the world in the newest Netflix food series "Ugly Delicious." I have watched the first two episodes: "Pizza" and "Tacos." The photo above captures Chang trying out tacos with two famous LA food writers: Jonathan Gold and Gustavo Arellano, whose writings I have enjoyed in the past. Both episodes are very focused on the vexed question of authenticity. Chang is pretty cynical about assigning any meaning to the term: food makes its own rules, would be my summary of his view, which I share. Is it good? That's the important question.

The series features beautiful images of many exotic places, people, food, and kitchens.

Two of the featured Mexican chefs have had serious trouble with American immigration. This very gifted owner of a restaurant in Mexico spent 27 years in the US, but can never return to his family here. In this episode, I found the treatment of the very unjust and cruel situation in our unfortunate country to be very impressive and somewhat surprising in its condemnation of how we are treating productive and hardworking individuals.

Both episodes emphasize the wide variety of interpretations of the two featured classics: pizza and tacos. This pizza is from a pizza maker in Naples. Despite his successful pizza, he has been blackballed by an organization that sets standards for Neapolitan pizza because he's too innovative. Interviews with the head of the standards organization verge on the disrespectful, probably with justification. Nobody owns pizza!

So where's the best pizza in the world? Evidently, it's in Tokyo.

Netflix just released this series, which has 8 episodes. The style is edgy and quirky! It might take a while to watch the other 6, though I watched the first two in one sitting without ever getting up from the couch! Images here are screen shots from the two episodes that I have watched.

Pondering the Chimichanga

"Where did the chimichanga, the glorious deep-fried burrito, come from anyway?" is the title of an article currently at the top of the L.A.Times column "The Daily Dish." I found both the question and the varying answers quite fascinating. I must admit that I find chimichangas delicious, enormous, and pretty undigestible, so in my experience they are more a memory of something I used to eat than an anticipation of something I might order in a Mexican restaurant any time soon. Maybe that's what inspired me to look around for more about this story.

What's a chimi? On the small chance that you don't know, the L.A.Times writer Margy Rochlin explains that a chimichanga is "a deep-fried burrito stuffed with steak, chicken or what-have-you. By most accounts, the chimi was invented in Tucson and is no less integral a part of the city’s fabric." Being invented in Tucson means that the chimi might be considered fusion food, though in fact the cuisine of southern Arizona in the early-to-mid twentieth century is pretty authentic Mexican.

Here's a screen shot of the google imagery for this dish:

The Times article summarized the two main origin stories for chimichangas, both taking place in Arizona restaurants. One story takes place in the 1920s: a burrito accidentally falling in hot oil elicited a near-curse from the restaurant owner (a curse that turned out to be "chimichanga!" which sounds like some other expression, never explained, in Spanish). Of course the resulting deep-fried burrito was so delicious that the restaurant kept making and serving them. The other story involves a restaurant owner who wanted to use up semi-stale burritos so he deep-fried them. These folklore-like tales also appear in numerous other sources as well -- in the New York Times in 2011, in a Smithsonian-sponsored website "What it Means to be American," in a 2014 article by Gustavo Arellano, and on quite a few sites of restaurants that claim some connection with this history.

The writers who looked into the chimichanga origin story generally agreed that smaller deep-fried snacks appear in the cuisine of Mexican state Sonora, nearest state to Arizona. Arellano, whose book Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America I quite enjoyed, suggests (maybe whimsically) that Chinese men who lived in Arizona and Sonora in the early 1900s often married Mexican women, and that the chimichanga is their effort to make egg rolls for their homesick husbands. He even tries to invent a linguistic explanation with a Chinese origin for the name "chimichanga," which I would say is utterly unconvincing!

Arellano warns his readers: "Let me also note that folk etymologies are notoriously inaccurate, that Mexican-food origin stories are frequently ludicrous, and that this mini-essay might be the most ludicrously inaccurate history of a Mexican foodstuff yet."

The Amazing Tacopedia

How many kinds of tacos are there? I'd heard of tacos al pastor and fish tacos, but I learned about a lot of other tacos in the all-encompassing and sprawling presentations of the Tacopedia. Authors/creators  Deborah Holtz and Juan Carlos Mena have a fantastic sense of humor. Sixteen categories of tacos -- including insect tacos -- appear in the main section.

Where do taco ingredients and methods come from? Corn, tomatoes, and chili were all in Mexico before 1492, but beef, pork, and metal grills and griddles used for cooking are all European, originally:

"Pork carnitas is one of the most famous dishes in Mexican cuisine. .... Without a doubt, the flexible tortilla and the tender pork come together to provide an unparalleled culinary performance: that corn dough with which the gods created the first man in the Americas meets the pig, an animal that in New Spain in the sixteenth century was eaten as proof of adherence to the Catholic faith." (p.143)

The role of technology in tacos? Taco-making depends on a variety of inventions. For example, "basket tacos" are carried from taco kitchen to customers in bicycle baskets; during the ride, the tacos finish cooking by being steamed while they are all packed together. And tacos al pastor were originally (and sometimes still) made on a gyros vertical grill introduced to Mexico by Middle-Eastern immigrants around a century ago. Overall, the authors' casual way of looking at food history is delightful.

How do Mexican idioms incorporate food metaphors? Check out the amusing image above left. Even though I don't know Spanish, I found these little illustrations very entertaining.

Where can you get the best of every kind of tacos? And how would you make them yourself? In this encyclopedic book, each description of a type of taco is accompanied by a page of recommended taco stalls, food trucks or restaurants in Mexico, as well as by a variety of recipes. The more obscure ingredients and spices are also explained and pictured.

Tacopedia is a colorful and very playful book, illustrated with original drawings, photos, and reproductions of many classic images ranging from Aztec codex drawings to works by Diego Rivera and other Mexican artists. The layout is either chaotic or creative, depending on how you look at it. It's printed on a rough-textured paper, as if it's a phone book or some such informal document. Also, it's full of statistics about consumption and production of food in Mexico. And funny little facts like this: "In the Second World War, the pilots of the Mexican 201st squadron wrote on the side of a missile: 'Take this Taquito, Hirohito.'" (p. 168)

The authors feel that tacos are a key to their culture, and they show enormous respect for the makers and innovators of this food. As the introduction puts it: "there must be something deeply rooted in our culture that makes tacos this culinary wonder loved by the whole world... unlike any other dish, tacos are one of the most definitive traits of Mexican culture." (p. 9)

I've read a few books on tacos and their close culinary relatives by North American writers. Tacopedia is a welcome addition to my library and to my knowledge. More books --

• Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America by Gustavo Arellano.
• Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food by Jeffrey M. Pilcher.
• Que vivan los tamales!: Food and the Making of Mexican Identity, another by Jeffrey M. Pilcher.
• And I haven't read yet, but on my list: Tortillas: A Cultural History by Paula E. Morton.

Mexican Food, American Promoters

As I said in my most recent post, I couldn't resist reading Gustavo Arellano's new book Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. It's every bit as good as I expected. I liked the organization by food type. First, Arellano discusses the tamales that were sold by street vendors in many US cities in the 19th century.  Then chili, tacos, enchiladas, burritos, salsa, each becoming well-known, popular, and highly profitable in non-Mexican communities throughout the country. There's also a diversion into the history of a famous tortilla with the face of Jesus on it.

The most salient fact about each popularization, is that Mexican restaurant owners or food vendors or more recently food trucks have developed the foods for American taste, but in every case, it was non-Mexicans who cleaned up by amplifying sales. Taco Bell, the late (unlamented) Chi-Chi's, Chipotle, etc. were all the result of a non-Mexican amplifying what Mexicans had invented. There's really no implication of theft, just that the non-Mexicans seemed to have had the capital and know-how to scale a good idea into a national or regional restaurant chain -- and make a lot of money. Similarly, Arellano describes how most high-profile grocery products like Old El Paso tortillas and salsa, Newman's Own, Pace, Gebhardts, etc. were developed by non-Mexicans, based on the recipes and expertise of Mexican cooks and sauce makers.

Arellano also has a very interesting chapter called "How Did Americans become Experts at Writing Cookbooks on Mexican Food?" I never thought about this either. Non-Mexicans study regional cooking, become well-versed by interviewing Mexican cooks, and they write the books.

The book reminds me of Jennifer 8 Lee's book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, which explores how Chinese food became so popular throughout the USA. Both authors have a fantastic grasp of the way Americans of many ethnicities think and how they form food tastes. Both present the experiences of ethnic food producers and what it means to them, not just to the consumers.

Where do tacos come from?

How many really intriguing reviews does it take to get me to buy a book? I've been reading quite a few reviews of the newly published book Taco USA by Gustavo Arellano. Julia Moskin's review, featured on page one of the online New York Times (shown above), made me do it. From the reviews and amazon's Look Inside the Book feature, I'm convinced that Arellano will enlighten me about many features of American food  history. He emphatically says it's not a book about Mexico, and not a book about fancy "authentic" Mexican restaurants with that weird corn fungus and epazote. I wonder if he'll mention Xochimilco which used to be in downtown Detroit (maybe still is). And I wonder if it served his sort of American Mexican food or something else.

Maybe the first reference I saw to Arellano's book was L.A.'s Idea of Mexican Food vs. What Mexicans Really Eat last March. A Venn diagram from the article appears below -- it's one of a series of Venn diagrams about what various ethnic groups eat and what we think their cuisine is about. It's a fun article, with quite a few other ideas about "real" Mexican food.

See "Gelatina" in the list of things that Mexicans in Mexico eat? It's Jello with fruit in it. Colorful. Who knew?

The next thing I'm probably going to do: open my iPad to the Kindle app and start reading Taco USA. I'll write my own review some time soon.