Brownsville Texas The Taco Town

For Mexican food lovers,the border town of Brownsville, Texas is heaven. There you can buy different , fresh made varieties , full of a wide spectrum of spices and fillings.It is one of the best places in all the US to eat the best of the spiciest best.


Regular contributor, Priya Krishna, wrote about this Texas border town in yesterday's New York Times Food section.Brownsville is not an easy town to get to, yet it's attracting all sorts of attention.The town is a relatively poor one, despite its' proximity to the chichi Texas resort South Padre Island. Things are looking up, thanks, in part to Elon Musk, breaking ground for the world's first commercial orbital launching site and the darker Casa Padre, a detention center for immigrant boys. The city's Southmost section, is the place for delicious and famed Mexican dishes. It is supported by Brownsville's robust population of Mexican immigrants, many who arrived thanks to the Bracero Project. This was a collaboration between the US and Mexico that allowed millions of guest workers between the years 1942 to 1964.  This brought in skilled cooks whose taquerias served as models for the ones we eat at today.One of the oldest is Vera's, opened in 1955 by Armindo Vera. His is the most traditional, with him smoking cow heads for barbacoa, until it's tender and falling off the bone. He serves it with corn tortillas, onions, cilantro and several different kinds of salsa.

The good food isn't limited to just the US side. The town across the border, Matamoros hosts Marcelos, a family owned restaurant. It, too, is extremely popular, drawing guests as far away as China and Germany. The reason for it's worldwide popularity is the way its' food is cooked. These are family recipes created by Evangelina Rocha and her husband, Abel Mondragon. They and their sons , Adan and Isai create their famed chicharrones verdes, pork skins bathed in tomatillos,green chilies and cilantro, then served inside plush corn tortillas.Their tacos are famed, thanks to the tender loving care put into them. The meat has to be cleaned. The dried beans have to be high quality while the salsa should be made exactly to the recipe.Back in Brownsville there is competition with Sylvia's and Easy To Go Tacos, the last serving flautas, fried rolled tacos stuffed with meat. They also serve tostadas and fajitas too along with borrachos, spicy tamales. Has politics affected the restaurants in this border town? ICE agents do eat at these places. There is the wall being built yet there have been tension between Mexico and Texas for decades, long before Trump came in.

Politics aside , Brownsville will always be the taco capital of the world. It has the best taquerias that serve family recipes , full of good ingredients. This border town knows there are no sides when it comes to delicious Mexican food.

Marriages

Columbus did a lot for food fusions despite  his many sins. The Americas opened up  world of different marriages on so many levels that could not have been possible on the other continents. Recipes were fused as nationalities mingled and married. It created a brand new cuisine.

Marriages are  the first places where fusion cooking occurs. Many Germans and Italians have intermarried in the last 140 years with them recipes. Italians learned how to make spaetzle, pasta's Teutonic cousin while Germans  experimented with brajole, rouladens's or beef roll's relative from across the Alps.Kids, hybrids, themselves had the joy of one of the most varied charcuterie's from landjager and teawurst to mortadella and prosciutto.Greeks , usually thought of being exclusive, married out and brought such diverse foods as corned beef and Yorkshire pudding into diets, rich with dolmades and pastisio. As more and more people came to both North and South America, intermarriage occurred. People from the islands came and fell in love with, not their new cities but the people in them. Rice and beans became  a side dish to such American classics as roast turkey and squash. New cuisines , such as Tex-Mex a combination of Texan and Mexican and Creole, a wide mix of French and Spanish recipes, but also influenced by Amerindians, African, along with Haitian, Italian, German and Irish.

The Columbian Exchange also brought another type of marriage. Ingredients from both sides of the Atlantic  were now being combined to create brand new dishes. Italians embraced tomatoes so much that it's hard to think of Southern Italian cuisine without them.Corn, another New World crop is the catalyst from turning polenta, that ancient recipe that first used barley , into pure heaven and a staple of Northern cuisine. Corn also brought that international snack favorite popcorn all over the globe. The South American tuber, the potato was all important in feeding both Ireland and Germany. It's big in Swabian German recipes like ,kartofelkloesse dumplings made with potatoes and zinged up with gingersnps. They're the chief component in potato pancakes or latke, along with the Irish boxties and English tattie fish. The Europeans brought  over the domesticated meats such as beef, chicken and pork. Without these Mexican cuisine would not have chicken tacos , beef flautas and pork chilis.
. The indigenous North Americans gave the world its' most famous bird, the turkey, used in every holiday dinner , both in the US and the UK.


Columbus ushered in the Age of Discovery . He also brought in marriages of diverse culture and fusion cuisines. The Columbian Exchange changed the world's lives and diets