>
Article snippet: A year or so ago, in a fit of hunger after a long day of working outside, I pulled in at a Mexican-themed restaurant near my home, and for no other reason than the fact that everyone else was doing so, made like the other mutts sitting at the bar watching sports and sucking down beers: I ordered three-no-make-it-four hard-shell tacos with picadillo, guac and sour cream, yellow cheese and shredded lettuce. I dolloped hot sauce on the sour cream, red rivulets running down the white, and ate, perfectly content. I ordered a fifth and felt proud I had finished it, just as I had in middle school, crushing taco day in the cafeteria. Nostalgia requires sadness. The word comes from Greek ones: nostos, homecoming; algos, pain. I felt none at that moment and none in the days that followed. Instead, the combination of silkiness and crunch, the taste of sweet corn and salty, warm-spiced meat, the bite of Cheddar, cool lettuce and the fire of the hot sauce left me happy, sated, at ease. I started to cook them at home. Probably you have some notions about hard-shell tacos, those prefabricated crunch sleeves of bright yellow corn, filled with spiced ground beef. They are as Mexican as a ranch house in the Michigan suburbs. They are a taste of inauthenticity, perhaps, a heretical sham — lame supermarket Tex-Mex food, a whitewashed charade. Gringo tacos, some people call them, an embarrassment. But they remain well loved — and in surprising quarters. “Hard-shell tacos served their... Link to the full article to read more