Where Nacho's Come From

“Did you know that Nachos were invented right here, in Piedras Negras, Coahuila.” That was the first thing she said to us. The question was: Tell us about the Mexican Summer. And she seemed to have ignored us entirely.

“Yes,” she said, “they like to talk all about the drugs that we bring into the country, but I want to talk about the foods. I can tell you all about how we take corn husks and wrap them in maza, and take chicken braised in spices, which under the right amount of heat becomes el ambiente of the kitchen.”

Tiles surrounded us in colors of ancestry, their brushstrokes probably from shaking hands, from viejitos who’d known no other living.

“Tamales,” she said. The crew knew tamales. There were ladies in San Antonio famous for them. Mr. Eidson had bought some for the holiday party.

“Yes, for holidays. In Christmas, you eat tamales. A teacher arrives at your ranch, you eat tamales. A grandson turns four, you eat tamales.”

“Or what of this?” she said, holding up a round of dough, a crumbly sort of donut that was done up in colors like Easter, or like the french macaron.

“Surely, you’ve seen one before. Surely you’ve eaten one?”

We nodded like fools.

“What’s it called?” She said.

There was dead silence, then:

“A shell, I believe.”

“Conchita,” she corrected. “That’s what I’m called, too.”

-

Conchita Consuelo Quinola. Owner-operator of Restorante Jalisquero’s in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico.

-

“My tio, his name was Ignacio. Now, Ignacios, you don’t call them Iggy, you call them Nacho. See what I’m getting at?”

“Ignacio never had a restorante. He was always working, working, working, always under someone else. He worked where he could, grilling chicken with his bare fingers, with nothing but a hot sun and a hot grill and some firewood. This was how he lost his fingerprints. It gave him trouble sometimes with the law, but luckily the law didn’t come looking so often. Sometimes, he worked with the cazadores, and I’m talking American cazadores, men who showed up with their big trucks and big wallets and big guns. Off to some ranch, and he’d cook the deer and whatever else was their catch for the day. The hunters were good, he said. Not much gunpowder to work around in that meat, he said.”

“Granted, some of these hunters were famous. I couldn’t tell you the names, who, because the pictures of those days burned up in the fire, but this was the 50s, so use your imagination.”

“So you didn’t see much of Tio Nacho very often, but when he was here,” and she pointed through a circular window to the lush courtyard out back. “He was singing through food. He didn’t have a voice for singing, but he sure had a voice for food.”

-

We were in the courtyard now. It was a stripped and faded pink on all the surrounding walls but one, which was bare concrete. Conchita’s father built the entire house, had built many houses in the colonia using concrete bricks and hands hard as stale bread. The restaurant was an extension of that house.

Conchita swept up confetti as she talked. Ants snipped at pastries on the folding tables which were obvious casualties of some sort of party. A tree the size of god’s fist cut through the patio, and every so often a green avocado would drop to the grass with a thump.

“There was no money for an air conditioner then. My abuela would say the summer sun in Piedras was el ojo del diablo. The eye of the devil. And the devil’s heat did not relent in the nights. Even with the windows open, it would become hard to breathe, so we would rather sleep right here, on the coolness of this grass among the ants, and we’d make stories from the stars. With my abuela, everything was an invento. If she had any sense of humor, she would have been a star of the improv.”

She grabbed a stack of dry maiz tortillas that lay on a folding table.

“See this? To you, this is a stale thing, old, left to turn hard in the air. To her, it was affordable. She’d buy these, with a handful of pesos from the couch, and she’d buy milk that had gone unsellable. She picked the best one using her nose.” Conchita turned to profile and showed off the family nose.

Conchita grabbed a dull knife, cut the tortillas into small slices on the folding table, then gathered them all up into her two hands, holding the fists in front of her.

“She’d heat them slightly, just to give them some life, some give, something to work with. And she’d take this caña, this very caña here.”

She rushed to the edges of the south wall, where green sugarcane snaked out between the concrete.

“She’d crush the sugar out of it, yes? Smother the tortilla slices in it. Warm the milk a bit. And we’d have corn flakes. There was nothing in the pantries, see? Nothing in the cabinets. But we were hungry.”

-

She’d taken us back into the kitchen, where the afternoon sun was glowing golden among the artisanal colors of the tiles.

She’d stuck the tortilla slices in a pan with oil.

“You can fry these, too, see? Versatile.” And she did so, frying them not with the grace and glamour of a tv chef flipping fire into the air, but with the sweaty brow of labor, of need and necessity.

She drained the oil, and plated the tortilla slices.

“We call them totopos, you call them tortilla chips. See how they changed color? That’s the consomate. Take one.”

We did. We’d never had one like it, reader, and I fear we may never again.

“And now, you can add all kinds of toppings,” she said. There were pots pluming with steam, and she reached into them, ladling a scoop of beans on the plate. From a drawer, she grabbed a grater right out of a catalog from the 50s, an old reliable, and grated some fresh oaxaca cheese on top. Conchita moved to a plank that seemed to be splitting at the seams, cutting up onions and cilantro and herbs and chiles and one of the green avocados from the tree in the courtyard, with clean efficiency, and slid them all down on the plate, the plank dripping with the fresh juices, with the earthy smells of la tierra. She chopped one last item: a lime, dripping like acid rain onto the plate which looked like Fiesta.

-

“That recipe was an invento,” conchita said. She watched her granddaughter whisk eggs in a large bowl.

“My tio, he got his knack for inventos from my abuela. It’s what pobreza does to you. One day, in a cantina, some rich folks showed up wanting to get drunk and wanting to eat good. There was nothing left in the pantries, nowhere left to go at that hour and restock. Nothing but some old tortillas, a bit of oil, some consomate, some herbs and onions, some queso oaxaca, an avocado from the yard. It was right there,” she said. “Right across the street.”

She pointed out the open window to a bar which had planks nailed on the door. Her granddaughter seemed to grow frustrated with the eggs. Conchita grabbed the bowl and whisked as she spoke. All were silent as the eggs in the bowl ballooned upward, like some sort of high school science experiment. She handed the bowl back to a granddaughter whose face read of failure.

“In the summers, now, Americanos eat nachos at the concession stands, at the hot games, or in their hot backyards. They do it in crockpots with fake cheese, with chips made in a factory. They want to talk about the drogas we bring in, but I want to talk about the food.”