Tacos Dorados de Atún Veracruzanos

This is from Veracruz. The port, where the Gulf comes right up to the malecón and the boats bring in tuna before the sun is high. Tacos dorados de atún belong to Cuaresma, the weeks of Lent when the coast sets meat aside and turns to fish, and to Carnaval, when Veracruz throws the loudest party in Mexico in the days before the fasting begins.

Read the filling and you read the history of the state. Jitomate and chile from the Indigenous kitchen. Green olive, caper, and olive oil from the Spanish ships that landed here first, before they reached anywhere else in this country. This is La Tercera Raíz on a plate: Indigenous, Spanish, and African, the three roots that made Veracruz what it is. The guiso is the same a la veracruzana base the señoras spoon over a whole fish. Here we flake the tuna into it and cook it down until the tomato goes jammy and the olives and capers do their salty work.

The tortilla is corn. Always corn. You warm it so it bends instead of cracking, lay the tuna across it, roll it tight, and fry it in hot fat until the outside crackles and turns gold. That is what dorado means. Golden. A flour tortilla here would be a costume, and yellow cheese would be an insult. No me vengas con atajos.

My mother was from Jalisco, not the Gulf. But she kept a page in her notebook copied from a woman she sat beside on a bus to Xalapa in the 1970s. 'Atún con aceituna,' it reads, and in the margin, in pencil: 'no escatimes las alcaparras,' don't skimp on the capers. I have eaten these tacos at a portales stand on the malecón with a salsa roja de chipotle and a cold beer while the danzón played in the square, and the woman in that margin was right. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.