Last night I made
burritos for the family and some guests who were over. I can remember making burritos with the same
simple formula some sixteen years ago in Beijing for my stepson and his buddy,
who were nine years old at the time.
Roll em’ up, press em’ down on the griddle and serve em’ up and they’d
yell out from the other room “zhen hao
chi!” (these taste great!). By the time we were serving them up last
night, our contemporary house full of kids from nine to fourteen years old were
famished, so I just dropped them on to plates as soon as they were done. I had enough tortillas to serve sixteen
people, which I thought would be enough.
It wasn’t.
Burritos are one of those food items that port well, across
civilizations. Port well, at least,
across among young people. Certainly my
burritos aren’t delicate. They’re hearty
rather than refined. Chinese adults
might just politely nibble. Friends used
to fine cuisine might smile but find it all a bit bland. But for kids, they seem to work like pizza or
hot dogs, or dumplings or gyros or any number of other simple starch and meat,
starch and cheese staples from around the world, that you can grab in your hand
and make short work of.
When I was a vegetarian in my 20s, living in New York I’d
make these same ploughman’s delicacies.
I don’t think my approach has changed much since that time. I probably would have used rice back then and
there wouldn’t have been any beef. But
my standards for a quality burrito has certainly changed. I can remember living in NYC and going to
“Benny’s Burritos” in the Lower East Side when a friend from SF visited. I may as well have taken a picky New Yorker
to your local Dominoes.
Later, living for six years in San Francisco, at Mission and
Valencia, with an abundance of options, you learn to get picky. La Taqueria near 25th and
Mission or so always had the final word, in my book. El Toro, was also old-but-gold. Last time I was there a few weeks back two
friends took me to one on Mission that was good, (their fave) but not great. Something about the way they grill the beef at
La Taqueria is impossible to replicate.
That first bite is always as good as you remember it. The moment right before always: 持家声响[1] And
this authentic Mexicali taste isn’t really portable as anything other than an
approximation.
If you’re in New York, good pizza’s everywhere, but great
pizza isn’t always accessible. I can
remember when I was a teacher in Brownsville, Brooklyn, some of the other staff
knew a place out in Canarsie that had Sicilian slices that were utterly
distinct. I don’t know what they did,
but the tomato sauce and the tomato slice they put on top soothed you from the
first bite. Again, it was somehow their
special taste. The West Indian teachers
knew where to get Jamaican roti in Flatbush that had plantain, which upon
biting stopped the world for just the moment.
In Japan it is the properly fresh sushi.
In Shandong it is real baozi.
All these foods, tied with the bite to the specific location. They seem impossible to port effectively out
of that unique setting. It’s always a
pleasure to sample a close approximation.
But core local tastes, these are almost impossible to replicate in a new
locale. In fact, the local familiarity
utterly ruins approximations of “sushi” in Beijing, or “burritos” in Japan.
One guy, who might be able to weigh-in on New York pizza vs.
California burritos was the jazz drummer Shelly Manne. Born and raised in NYC, he later bought a
ranch on the outskirts of L.A. (that was probably long since enveloped by
sprawl,) and where he lived till his death in 1984. I was first familiar with him from the name
of the nightclub he was a part owner in “Shelly’s Manne Hole.” I’ve long had a disc of Bill Evans that was
recorded there but hadn’t known the owner was also a musician. Well, Shelly played and recorded at his Manne
Hole as well. I’ve got the 1966
release, “Boss Sounds: Shelly Manne
& His Men At Shelly's Manne-Hole [Live].”
Often labeled as a member of the cerebral West Coast Jazz scene, this
disc is straight up bop, which fortunately sounds good no matter which coast it
was recorded on.
[1] chǐjiáshēngxiāng: lit. to feel the taste in one's mouth (idiom)
/ fig. to water at the mouth / to drool in anticipation
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