Taco Night with Recipes by Alex Stupak

On Sunday, the Boston Area Cookbook Club took on Taco Night –  Alex Stupak Style. Tacos: Recipes and Provocations came out in 2015. It caught my eye. On one had, tacos are ubiquitous creations where anything eaten in a folded tortilla earns the name taco. Yet, this cookbook gets rave reviews (like this one on Food52). Several ‘Best of’ lists also lauded lauded it in 2015 (like this one from Epicurious).  So, does that make this book a conundrum, oxymoron or just confused?

As a kid, tacos usually meant tearing open an envelope of ‘taco seasoning; and dumping it over cooked ground beef. We loaded the greasy, beefy, salty mixture into the bottom of a stale taco shell that might sat on a grocery store shelf for weeks… months… years. We topped it off with shredded, yellow, generic cheese, chopped iceberg lettuce, jarred salsa and a splash of hot sauce. Sometimes, diced tomatoes or sour cream made an appearance.

Inevitably, the grease soaked through the bottom of the shell making a soggy mess. Often resulting in something more like a nachos than a tacos.In high school, I enthusiastically consumed tacos from a certain fast food franchise with taco in its name.; wait don’t most those faux-Mexican fast food franchises have ‘taco’ in their name? Well, take you pick of which, but a high school student could eat lunch on about $2.50 a day which beat my weekly allotment of money from my parents. A number selected to cover an school cafeteria meal. So, yeah, two 59  cent beef tacos wrapped in a doughy and chewy and bland tortilla with a coke was a pretty good deal.

Since that shaky start, I’ve indulged in much better taco creations. The Taquerias in Houston. Street carts in Mexico. Bodegas in California. Even with all my new food pedigrees and affection for all things local, the taco was still not something justified for a whole cookbook. Much less one aimed at gourmet rather than cliche. Seriously, many cookbooks on this topic aim for ‘make ’em with your kids’ or ‘put anything in a tortilla and call it a taco’. Like this gem screaming “TACO NIGHT!” at me (note: this series includes “PIZZA NIGHT!” and “PASTA NIGHT!”).

Well, I was wrong. At first, Tacos overwhelmed me.

Recipes are complex. They include headings like ‘Advanced Preparation’, ‘For the Filling,’ and ‘To Assemble the Tacos.’  They contain multiple sub-recipes for marinades, salsas, toppings and tortillas. The dizzying array of recipes for salsas and sauces alone require a variety of techniques and days to prepare.

Lengthy ingredient lists are filled with hard to find items – Mexican oregano, piloncillo, achiote, epazote and canela. Earthy, spicy, flavorful Mexican chilies run rampant  – anchos, chipotle, guajillo, arbol, habanero, pastilla, poblano, piquin.

It illustrates a variety of tortillas ranging from ‘start with dry dent corn, soak it in lime, grind it then make a tortilla’ to saffron-flavored corn tortillas to meat-infused tortillas to basic flour tortillas. Preparations include dry pan roasting, slow cooking, braising, oven-roasting pan frying, deep frying. It asks us to get out a molcajete (a Mexiacan Mortar), blender, food processor, tortilla press and cast iron pans.

The cookbook was also very meat-centric with only a few vegetarian options – well, they were vegetarian if you opted to leave out the lard. There is lamb, tripe, lobster, oysters, seafood, goat, duck, tongue and, of course, pork, chicken, beef and fish too.

What the what? They are freaking tacos. Why is this so complicated?

I spent time digging into the cookbook before I realized I let my food snobbery get in the way. The Boston Area Cookbook Club tackled three cookbooks focused on Middle Eastern cuisine – Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi and Spice by Ana Sortun and Zahav by Michael Solomonov.  All very complex tomes where club members searched out ingredients, ordered specialty items, poured over recipes and took hours, if not days, to prepare.

Yet, I expected complexity from those books. As if Mexican cuisine is any less rich or complex or culturally significant than Middle Eastern cuisine. As if the bastardized food we get from taco fast food places represents the beautifully complex foods of Mexico. As if the fact I pay less than a dollar for ‘Mexican’ food is the value I put on cooking from a Mexican cookbook.

Our Taco Night was no less rich, complex and delicious than any of those other nights. We gathered in the kitchen. We pressed and cooked plain, saffron and spinach corn tortillas in cast iron pans along side hand rolled flour tortillas. We stuffed them with barbacoa, carnitas, chorizo and potato and chicken. We topped them with Salsa Mexicana, Salsa Verde,  Salsa Arriera, Adobo, Crema Mexicana and Barbacoa Sauce. We dipped vegetables in Sikil Pak. We had cilantro and limes and tomatoes and onions and olives. We drank Mexican beers and cheered a great night with a bit of smoky Mescal.

I will be cooking from Stupak’s book again and again. And I will never visit those packets of dried spices or taco fast places again .

Happy Cooking!