You’ll find that as with a lot of my other writing, I am going to provide even more context around the foods in the recipe articles going forward, because knowing the context surrounding a dish can change your opinion of that dish entirely, and a little bit of placebo effect from knowing the histories of the badasses who ate them. Moreover, if you wanted bland bullshit you’d be elsewhere. This is my insane quilt of stories, and it’s getting more rad by the fucking day.

Though protein bars probably aren’t as ubiquitous now as they were ten years ago, humanity has long had an obsession with creating the perfect, portable, protein-packed snack that is as delicious as it is nutritious. Dried meats were the obvious choice when convenience reigned over taste, but as humanity developed new methods of cooking and storing food, all sorts of rad primeval protein bars sprang into existence. From the bizarrely satisfying mixture of dried beef, fat, and berries that comprises pemmican to the hand pies and dumplings around the world, humanity has created some unbelievably delicious protein bars, most of which should stand proudly as a far more pleasant tasting alternative to yet another godawful Quest Bar you might be facing.

That’s not to say they’ve all been winners, either- there have been people like googly-eyed British aristocrat Sir George Reresby Sitwell, who invented the Sitwell Egg in the hopes someone might jump on one of his inventions, as his musical toothbrush and miniature anti-wasp gun had failed to gain traction. His idea actually sounds pretty good- some kind of a fake egg containing white rice with a smoked meat “yolk” as a portable meal for travelers, but it never caught on. There’s also whatever gastronomic atrocities the Icelanders get up to, but I likely will avoid sharing a recipe for pickled rotten shark burritos in lingonberry sauce, because that to me gives the word “food” a very loose definition.

So this series, Primeval Protein Bars, is going to cover every manner of hand-portable street food that packs enough protein to be worth mention to a heavy lifter. You might have the impression that street food is necessarily unhealthy, but you’d be incorrect- convenient doesn’t necessarily mean unhealthy- it’s not like there’s a motherfucker with an Uzi stood at the register at McDonalds forcing you to stuff your fat ass with a triple Big Mac with extra mayo and extra fries. Street food has the benefits of being easy to produce, quick to cook, and generally convenient as fuck. It’s not bougie, it’s not pretentious, and it’s damn sure not highbrow- it’s just the badass shit that has kept the brutes of centuries past going when they spent 16 hours a day swinging an 18 pound sledge or whatever.

One group of people who mastered the hand-held protein-packed, easily transportable method of gainz-making for which we should drop to our knees and thank daily are the Mexicans, who have bestowed upon us the dizzyingly spectacular culinary family of the taco and burrito. These inventions, while rather simple in execution and similar to other flatbread-based foods around the wold, seem to capture our hearts and taste buds with such extreme deliciosity that Mexican food is a veritable prison from which you have to learn to escape so as to still enjoy other foods, because few other cuisines embody the robust flavor, fire, and fusion of the food of our freewheeling friends of the formerly-French Mexico. And by prison I mean something more akin to the house in which Lawrence Taylor lived like Caligula for a year (though maybe without so much crack- LT was overly fond of the stuff)- no one is upset when they’re living on Mexican food for an extended period of time. Well, save for whoever cleans the toilets, unless they enjoy that sort of thing.

The roots of Mexican food obviously lie with the Aztecs (here’s a cool site with info on the Aztecs, their Jaguar Warriors, and some other cool Mesoamerican tribes), whose tripartite empire controlled what amounted to the northernmost habitable areas of Mexico (it was a bunch of nomads north of Central Mexico, and they were not exactly forthcoming about their culture before they were wiped out, but they did help to create chili con carne, as I’ll explain) to the food of the Mayan Empire to the Southeast.

These civilizations were obviously built atop others, but they were highly advanced civilizations that boasted some of the largest cities in the world- in 1519, Technochticlan’s population was between 200000 and 400000 people, which was a quarter to a half of the population of the largest at the time (Beijing), but at the smallest estimate was almost exactly the size of Europe’s second largest city at the time, Paris. If the estimate of 400000 is more accurate, to Constantinople, which was the largest European city at the time… and that means the Aztecs were at least as advanced in terms of civilization- these were hardly the dirty, backwards, unlettered savages we were led to believe growing up.

The Mayans were at that time in decline but their culture remained stronger than Ron Burgundy’s erection at the AVN awards, influencing all future generations in the region. They sort of get short shrift in this story due to the fact their empire was basically reduced to some luxurious coastal cities and a lot of ruins from wars, but you can see the influence of their local cooking techniques on Guatemalan and Southern Mexican food in particular.

In any event, the culinary practices of the people of Mesoamerica were well entrenched at the time of the Spanish conquest, plague, and general decimation of the region. After suffering seriously at the hands of some of Europe’s least rad ambassadors for about three hundred years, Mexico managed to gain its independence (with no small amount of help from the King Kong of swashbuckling badassery, Colonel Thomas Hoyer Monstery) and set about establishing a national identity. They’ve struggled to do so due to conflicts between the European-bred ruling class and the more native-blooded populace, but at least as early as the early 1900s they definitely had their food figured the fuck out, and their single greatest export? The motherfucking taco, and in particular tacos al pastor.

“In Mexico, the word taco is used as a generic term like the English word sandwich. By definition a taco is a traditional Mexican dish consisting of a corn or flour tortilla folded or rolled around a filling. Tacos are made with a variety of fillings. Fillings includes beef, pork, chicken, seafood, vegetables, and cheese. This allows for chefs to provide awesome versatility and variety” (Myrick).

You might have a favorite type of taco that is not the marinaded pork and pineapple concoction, shaved by a careful hand off a vertical rotisserie literally dripping with the succulent ambrosia that could only be the fuck-juice produced by a heavenly orgy co-hosted by the ancient gods of Eurasia and Mesoamerica, but you would have made the incorrect choice in taco type. Tacos al pastor roasted to perfection is almost unspeakably delicious when diced and added to a lightly toasted tortilla and topped with onion and cilantro- in eating it, you are violently fucking your taste buds’ vaginal canal with the righteous fist of the almighty god of hybrid-culture culinary artistry.

The taco has its origins in the pre-Columbian Aztec miner town of Guanajuato. Miners’ wives would often bring their husbands a midday meal and the theory is eventually the wives named the taco and taquito (though the taquito wasn’t mentioned until a decade after the taco was) after the small charges the Mexican miners used to free up ore), which were just gunpowder tightly wrapped in paper, like a taquito. The world’s most eminent taco historian, a Mexician food-and-culture afficionado named Jeffrey M. Pilcher (author of Planet Taco, and curiously an instructor at the notorious Southern American rape-and-torture factory-slash-military-college The Citadel, in what I’d assume is an effort to improve the school’s outward appearance), says

“The first references [to the taco] in any sort of archive or dictionary come from the end of the 19th century. And one of the first types of tacos described is called tacos de minero—miner’s tacos. So the taco is not necessarily this age-old cultural expression; it’s not a food that goes back to time immemorial” (Friesen).

Although there is no recipe for tacos de minero, the theory is that the miners’ wives adapted the recipe for enchiladas to make them more portable, placing the ingredients for the enchiladas inside of taco shells in an effort to make them easier to eat, and edible without utensils (and without getting too much coal dust on one’s food as it was eaten. Interestingly, the miners in the region didn’t seem to eat a meat-based meal midday, so the recipe does me very little good, but I’m including it in case any of you want to tinker with it. This comes directly from Culicurious, and as I said is entirely unadulterated because I rarely, if ever, eat meatless dishes, but it is certainly more useful than the first printed taco recipe, which dates to 1904 and is for some kind of meringue-filled dessert bullshit.

Tacos de Minero

Yield: 6 tacos (a meal for two)

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 to 2 cups vegetable oil (use more if needed)
• 1/2 pound white potato (~1 medium), cut into 1/2″ cubes (keep peelings on for better structure)
• 1/2 pound carrots (~2 large), cut into 1/4″ thick half-moons (keep peelings on)
• Fine salt, to taste
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1/2 cup diced white onion
• 2 teaspoons minced garlic
• 1/2 cup red enchilada sauce
• 6 hard or 12 soft corn tortillas, or 6 flour tortillas (your choice)
• 1/2 cup crumbled ranchero cheese (sub queso fresco, if needed)
• 1/2 cup diced white onion
• 1 cup shredded lettuce (optional)
• 4 to 6 pickled jalapenos
• 1 avocado, sliced
• Tajín seasoning, to taste

Were it me, I would add some kind of protein to this, be it Jenny O’s surprisingly good turkey chorizo to some simple salted-and-seared steak, but that’s up to you. This recipe is more for a historical resource and an idea for a base for a taco moreso than a recommendation for food for lifters.

DIrections:

Note: If you’re using hard corn tortillas, heat them in the oven per package directions. If you’re using soft corn tortillas or flour tortillas, heat only if that’s your preference using your normal heating method. You may only want to pre-heat the oven now and heat them when it’s closer to serving time.

Frying the potatoes and carrots:

1. If you have a Fry Daddy or any other electrical fryer, that’s recommended over frying manually, for both temperature control and general safety. Fill to the proper line with oil and heat to 350 ºF.
2. However, if you must use a skillet: heat the vegetable oil in a skillet–preferably a 10 to 12 inch skillet–to about 350 ºF.
3. From hereon the directions are basically the same: Once the oil is heated, add the potatoes to deep fry. You may need to work in batches, depending on the size of your skillet or electric fryer. Cook each batch of potatoes for 8 to 10 minutes, or until golden brown. Stir gently but often to prevent sticking. Carefully remove the potatoes from the frying oil and set the them on a plate lined with paper towels, to cool. Sprinkle with salt while the potatoes are fresh from the oil.
4. Repeat the frying process with the carrots, cooking for another 8 to 10 minutes per batch. Again, cook in batches if needed. Stir gently but often to prevent sticking. Carefully remove the carrots from the frying oil and set them on a plate lined with paper towels, to cool. Sprinkle with salt while the carrots are fresh from the oil.
5. Once you’re done frying, remove the skillet from the heat (or unplug your electric fryer) and allow the oil to cool in a safe place away from the rest of the cooking action.

Creating the taco filling:

1. After the frying is done, use different large skillet for this next step. Heat the two tablespoons of vegetable oil over medium high heat.
2. Next, add the chopped onions and cook until softened, stirring often, about 5 to 7 minutes.
3. Add the garlic, at this point: stir well and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute.
4. Add the enchilada sauce and stir well to combine.
5. Once the enchilada sauce is heated and slightly bubbly, add the fried carrots and potatoes to the mixture. Stir gently so as to not break up the carrots and potatoes. You only want to coat them.

Plating the dish:

1. If you want to heat your soft corn or flour tortillas, do it now. Also, if you’re opting for hard corn tortillas and haven’t heated them yet, now’s the time.
2. Add about a third of a cup of taco filling to each corn tortilla (you may want to double up the corn tortillas if you’re using soft corn tortillas). Top the taco with crumbled cheese, diced onion, and shredded lettuce (if using). Repeat until you’ve made all of the tacos, portioning three per plate.
3. Garnish the plate with pickled jalapeño and sliced avocado topped with Tajín seasoning (sub your favorite seasoning blend if you can’t find Tajín). For an extra special treat, add your pickled jalapeño and sliced avocado on the tacos.

As Mexico industrialized (a slow process given all of the upheaval in the country that arose from several successive oppressive dominations by European powers and regular revolts and rebellions as the lay people attempted to shrug off the dickheads in the aristocracy as they established their own unique identity. Mexico imported workers from every corner of the world, drawing heavily from Germany and Poland for railworkers (which is where we got what amounts to the Mexican polka [Norteño] that is crazy popular, and Mexican beers like Negra Modelo and Dos Equis), along with a mass emigration from China (which led to the same sort of immigration restrictions we adopted in the US, plus Ireland, Africa, Turkey, and basically every other place with boats.

While all that was occurring, a ton of cultural exchange was occurring between Texans and Mexicans, with the locus of that exchange being San Antonio. Now, before you start thinking of Texans as a wildly open-minded bunch, think of San Antonio as the eye of a particularly stupid racial war’s storm, sort of glaring daggers at everyone like Sauron’s eye, but super white trash style, surrounded by empty cans of Steel Reserve and Kid Rock cds. San Antonio’s Military Plaza, a former parade ground that came to be the city’s cultural and administrative center was the center of the city’s social life during it’s formative, frontier years, and the remnants of the nomadic tribes indigenous to the area began serving a combination of indigenous foods like tamales and the new North African-Mesoamerican fusion food chili con carne.

The people responsible were a beloved mainstay of San Antonio’s history right up until the Texans decided they once more hated all things non-white and forced the taco slingers, known as the Chili Queens of San Antonio, to close up shop. The Chili Queens were of unknown origin but were likely descendants of the nomadic tribes of southern Texas and Northern Mexico known collectively as the Coahuiltecan. Within a couple of decades of the American Civil War, the Chili Queens began selling their foods, including things like chili con carne that incorporated the spices of the Berbers of Northern Africa into their dishes, owing to heavy influence from a population of Canary Islanders who’d been settled in San Antonio by that city’s government help resist French influence in the city, due to whatever temporary xenophobia Texans had against French-speaking people at the time (Lomax).

For more than 100 years, the chili queens would spread the glory of the taco and chili con carne, arriving “twilight at the plazas of San Antonio, Texas, with makeshift tables and pots of chili to cook over open fires. The plazas teemed with people: soldiers, tourists, cattlemen and troubadours roamed the tables, filling the night with music” (Nelson).  These “chili con-quistadores” became the progenitors of all Tex-Mex food (which frankly is no more an epithet than the term “fusion food” is, as most modern food has fusion roots, from Indian, which relies heavily on Mesoamerican chilis, to Italian), though their proselytizing was brought to an end in 1937 when their food was declared “unsanitary” by old white people with terrible taste in food, music, and sex.

Did I mention the sex? Mexican food has been relentlessly associated with sex since the 18th century, and the chili queens were no exception. Plenty of newspaper accounts of the time regarding

“the chili queens in Military Plaza indicate how Anglo American tourists linked the chili queens with sex and service.  There is no documented evidence that the chili queens were prostitutes, yet the connection of the chili queens to sexual pleasure, as Pilcher suggests, ‘exemplifie[s] the Mexican American woman’s role providing the conjugal duties of food and sex to Anglo men.’  The association of the chili queens to sex also arises due to the city’s increasing links with vaudeville and prostitution in the nineteenth century and the close proximity of the chili stands to San Antonio’s “Reservation,” an area of tolerance for prostitution.  Other accounts of chili queens in the plazas describe them as feeding and serving the alianentary needs of soldiers, tourists, and various publics, including both Anglos and Mexicanos, throughout various decades” (McMahon 32).

In other words, Latin chicks have had the reputation for being sexy as fuck since long before Selma Hayek was born.

In other words, when you combine curvy broads, tacos, tequila, and music, people want to fucking party, and they were in the right section of town to do it. That wouldn’t do for the stuffy-ass ruling parties in San Antonio, who decided that their mostly useless backwater should make itself entirely so by turning its back on the shit that put it on the fucking map, and probably contributed to the fact that the city’s growth was relatively flat for a couple of decades after the abolition of the chili queens and their cultural influence, because why the fuck else would anyone go there prior to the invention of air conditioning unless it’s to shoot up a church because you’ve got a limp dick and a beef with your mother-in-law?

Up next, more recipes, more history, and more reasons to fucking love discovering new ethnic foods. I’ve not enjoyed heavy research like this in a long time, so prepare yourselves for info and delicious dumps, after which you’ll likely have to take a dump of your own.

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Sources:

Beezley, William H. Judas at the Jockey Club and Other Episodes of Porfirian Mexico (3rd Ed.). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

Burton, Anthony.  History’s Most Dangerous Jobs: Miners.  Charleston: The History Press, 2013.

Chouinard, Maxine.  Divers foul tricks and stratagems: Mexican and Bowie knife fighting.  Hemamisfits.  17 Aug 2014.  Web.  13 Jun 2020.  https://hemamisfits.com/2014/08/17/divers-foul-tricks-and-stratagems-mexican-and-bowie-knife-fighting/

Cuautla, Mexico, has the world’s oldest railway station building.  Geo-Mexico.  10 Mar 2010.  Web.  18 Jun 2020.  https://geo-mexico.com/?p=483

Ekinci, Ekrem Buğra. Sports culture in Ottoman society. Daily Sabah. 14 Oct 2016. Web. 15 Jun 2020. https://www.dailysabah.com/feature/2016/10/14/sports-culture-in-ottoman-society

Friesen, Katy June.  Where did the taco come from?  Smithsonian.  3 May 2012.  Web.  13 Apr 2019.  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/where-did-the-taco-come-from-81228162/

Lau, Sue.  Salsa Casera Roja (Orange Taquera Sauce).  Palatable Pastime.  27 Jan 2020.  Web.  6 Jun 2020.  https://palatablepastime.com/2020/01/27/salsa-casera-roja-orange-taquera-sauce/

Lomax, John Nova.  The bloody San Antonio origins of chili con carne.  Texas Monthly.  10 Aug 2017.  Web.  17 Jun 2020. https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/bloody-san-antonio-origins-chili-con-carne/

Martin, Addie K. and Jeremy Martin.  Tacos mineras recipe.  Culicurious.  2 Sep 2016.  Web. 13 Jun 20120.  https://www.culicurious.com/tacos-mineras-recipe/

McMahon, Marci R.  Domestic Negotiations: Gender, Nation, and Self-Fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana Literature and Art.  New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013.

Myrick, Richard.  A complicated but brief history of tacos.  Mobile Cuisine.  Web.  13 Jun 2020.  https://mobile-cuisine.com/culinary-lessons/history-of-tacos/

Nelson, Davia and Nikki Silvia.  The Chili Queens of San Antonio.  NPR.  15 Oct 2004.  Web.  19 Jun 2020.  https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4107830

Salazar, Marisel.  Tacos al pastor:  your favorite Mexicn food is actually Lebanese.  Tasting Table.  26 Apr 2017.  Web.  17 Jun 2020. https://www.tastingtable.com/dine/national/tacos-pastor-history

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