By Scott Graber
It is Saturday, early, and I’m in Port Royal. This morning I’ve got my coffee — Eight O’Clock, The Original — and the prospect of work in the yard. But this morning my thoughts keep going back to the Doritos Locos Taco, the so called D.L.T.
When I was a teenager, I spent Sunday morning at Mass; my military family was living in San Antonio, Texas. Mass was followed by lunch at an off-post restaurant. That lunch usually involved some form of chicken, some iteration on the potato, some type of sugar from a dessert trolley — usually lemon meringue pie.
One Sunday, my brother David and I spotted a small Mexican cantina and requested a temporary pass on the chicken, potato, cream pie theme that we had come to loath. And it came to pass — one unremarkable afternoon — that we found the taste, smell and tactile experience that is the singular province of the taco.
I can, to this day, remember siting in a small room surrounded by sombreros and Manolete posters, knowing I had departed the flatlands of the mashed potato and its dull, lumpen, big meat companions for a new sensory landscape centered on a corn shell full of stuff that made me happy to be alive.
I must confess that I was never really interested in knowing the chemistry of the taco — why does it taste so good? And so I was surprised by an article titled “The Crunch Bunch” in the New Yorker Magazine dated April 24.
This piece is focused the Taco Bell franchise and its effort to stay competitive. It tells us that Taco Bell is constantly experimenting with new products. Two of these items — the Crunchwrap and the Doritos Locos Taco — are the focus of the New Yorker article.
“The Doritos Locos Taco, or D.L.T., is designed to target taste buds using ‘dynamic contrast’ — in this case the sensation of biting through the crispy shell to the fat-laced filing. Exactly half of the D.L.T.’s hundred and seventy calories are from fat, the ideal ratio for a pleasing mouthfeel. The lactic acid and citric acid in the Doritos dust get the saliva flowing and excite the brain’s pleasure center, signaling you to eat more. The taco has what industry scientists call a “long hang time” flavoring system, meaning that the lingering smell stimulates food memories and cravings; meanwhile the multifaceted flavors are strong enough to trip “sensory-specific satiety,” a neural signal that makes you think you’re full.”
As one works through the New Yorker piece, it becomes apparent that the “crunch” is as important as the fat and the Dorito dust. Apparently we Americans like a shell that “snaps at four pounds of pressure per square inch.”
It is important to recognize that we in the South had the ingredients for the taco long before Taco Bell opened its first restaurant in 1962.
When English settlers arrived in Charleston the first thing they did was to plant corn. Their protein was wild or domesticated pigs. Most American food historians agree that Southern cuisine was the collision of corn and pork although we in South Carolina had a long dalliance with rice.
It is true that the Charleston aristocracy found ways to eat oysters, shrimp and turtles — items that did not, at first glance, appear to be edible. But the average South Carolinian relied on corn meal baked, boiled and fried.
Richard Hooker (former Beaufort resident and author of “Food and Drink in America”) wrote, “The conversion of cornmeal into bread could be simplicity itself. An ashcake was made by mixing meal with water, adding some salt, and forming small pones which were wrapped in corn shucks and covered with hot ashes and embers in the fireplace. A hoecake was similar, except it was toasted before the fire on a clean board, a piece of metal or outdoors, on a rock sloping toward the fire. What was called corn pone was similar except that it was baked in an oven and the rough dough raised with yeast …”
In order to escape their backwoods boredom our ancestors would sometimes pour molasses over their baked corn; but as far as I can tell, we Southern folk didn’t realize that we were missing the all-important crunch that came with the taco.
It is true that Mexico gave us the questionable benefits of the chimichanga, refried beans and the Pina Colada (actually Puerto Rico).
But one cannot ignore the taco.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
