Tacos

A warm corn tortilla the size of a palm, folded around a few spoonfuls of filling and finished with onion, cilantro, salsa and a squeeze of lime: that is a taco, and it is a format rather than a recipe, which is why Mexico has hundreds of them. The word is first recorded in the eighteenth-century silver mines, where a taco was a paper-wrapped charge of gunpowder, and the food took the name in the nineteenth century in Mexico City. The main families are tacos al pastor, pork marinated in chile and achiote and carved from a vertical spit, a Lebanese import turned Mexican in the 1960s; tacos de carne asada, grilled beef, in the north; tacos de canasta, steamed in a basket and sold from bicycles; tacos de guisado, stewed fillings from a row of clay pots; Baja fish tacos in beer batter; and the suadero, tripa and cabeza of the capital's night stands.