Tacos de Machaca Sonorense

Machaca is from Sonora. Specifically from the cattle ranches of the Sonoran Desert, where the vaqueros needed beef that could survive a week in the saddle without refrigeration. They salted strips of round or flank, hung them on the line in the dry desert wind, and pounded the cured meat soft with a stone before cooking it. The word comes from machacar, to pound. The technique is older than the border that runs above it.

This is a noroeste dish and it eats nothing like a taco from the south. The tortilla is flour, not corn. That is not Tex-Mex. The flour tortilla is a Sonoran birthright, made with wheat that the Spanish brought to the Yaqui valley in the 1700s and that thrived where corn struggled. The fat is lard or beef tallow. The chile is colorado del norte, mild and grassy, not a hot chile from Oaxaca or Yucatan. The salsa on the table is chiltepin, the wild pea-sized chile that grows along the arroyos of the Sierra Madre Occidental. Every part of this dish belongs to the desert that built it.

My mother was from Jalisco and she did not cook machaca. I learned it from a senora named Dona Lupita, my namesake, who ran a market stall in Hermosillo and who pounded her own carne seca on a wooden board worn smooth by thirty years of use. She told me that the vaqueros used to wrap the cooked machaca in a flour tortilla, tuck it inside their shirts to keep it warm, and ride for hours before lunch. The taco de machaca was a working person's food before it was anyone's idea of a meal. It still is. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.