My first memories of summer are smells - barbecue, the chlorine in the town swimming pool, campfires, and of course, the quintessential smell of summer - tacos. To this day, the aroma of fresh tacos instantly resurrects long evenings, fireworks, days off of school . . . it's a smell that threatens to drag me off into reverie whenever I walk past a Mexican restaurant.
When I was a child, during the first week in June, the vine outside the house would suddenly burst with orange flowers, and the subtle cumin aroma that wafted through the neighborhood (because everybody grew them) was our signal that school was almost over. The flowers were flamboyantly orange, with three long petals, and they were so numerous as to completely obscure the dark green foliage underneeth. Within a week or two, the petals would fall off, and tiny hard green things like unripe wild grapes remained in their place. The immature berries slowly got larger, stretching out to become elongated like some sort of seed pod. Soon they reached the size of an adult's hand, and gradually took on the sandy hue that signalled ripeness.
They were plump half-moons and in the warm sunlight they felt full-to-bursting with life and vitality, and one glorious day, usually just before the Fourth of July, they would do just that: first one, and within a few days, dozens of them would split open along the top, exposing the wonderful flesh within. One vine would have a score of them, in different stages of readiness, hanging heavily, threatening to tear the entire plant off the trellis outside the kitchen window.
The whole town would be heavy with the smell of tacos when this happened. Day by day the variegated pulp within the fruit would turn brown, and red, and yellow, and green. Finally, a few days after opening, a thick green ooze called guacamole (from a Nahuatl word meaning "taco nectar") would cover the flesh, and at that point, they were ready to pick. So numerous were the fruits that we would simply reach out our kitchen window, feel around a little with our hands, and come back with armfuls of them. We would stuff ourselves on tacos, eating virtually nothing except for the succulent, spicy, oddly meaty flesh of the taco vine, unable to restrain ourselves after a year's anticipation. It was a standard joke in our town that we all had to wear "taco pants" during taco season to accomodate our expanded girth. Despite the temptation of games of baseball and late evenings playing in the woods, this was the only time of year our mothers didn't have to nag us to finish eating before we ran outside, instead beaming approvingly at our enormous appetites.
The biology and the history of the taco
Greek mythology tells us that a contest was held between Poseidon and Athena, in which each deity attempted to offer a gift to the people of Greece. Poseidon waved his trident, and from the sea emerged a creature, larger than a human, which could carry riders and perform labor on the farm. Athena saw this gift - the horse - and conjured a tree out of the earth. The tree was an olive tree, and its delicious fruit and useful oil were recognized by the Greeks as the superior gift. Thus was the city of Athens named. In rage at the rejection of his gift, Poseidon is said to have sailed across the Adriatic Sea and struck his trident into the earth, whereupon the soil burst forth and a vine grew, with orange flowers whose petals numbered three to mirror the three tines on Poseidon's trident. Thus he gave to the Italians a gift greater than the olive. It's not known whether Italy is indeed the ultimate origin of the taco, but it was certainly found in the oldest Roman records. To the Romans, the taco was a food source, a shade plant that kept houses cooler in the hot summer months, and a source of oil for lamps and cooking.
Outside of myth, the origins of the taco are unknown; when Spanish conquistadores established colonias in Mexico, they were astonished to discover the taco growing wild - a bit of the familiar amidst the foreign cultures and alien plant life of New Spain. The European and American tacos were later recognized as distinct varieties of one species, the now unaptly-named Taconus europeanus. The European variety once grew wild all along the European side of the Mediterranean, as far east as Asia Minor, all the way west to Portugal. They were widely called the "traveler's fruit", because they could be found growing wild virtually everywhere in southern Europe, and they thus provided sustainance for hungry travelers and the dispossessed. (In Spain, they're sometimes called "gypsy fruit" for the same reason.) The American variety still grows wild in much of Mexico and Central America. Tacos were well-known to the Mexican Indians, suggesting that they spread across the two continents in prehistoric times.
The wild varieties of T. europeanus reproduce by means of pits found in the fruit, but the cultivated variety has no seeds, and is grown from cuttings. This variety is a hybrid of European and American varieties, thought to have been originally created by Jesuit monks in what is now California. The hybrids are large, juicy, and succulent like the wild American varieties (adapted to a somewhat more arid environment than those of Europe) and they grow on tough woody vines. The European variety, in contrast, is smaller, and spicier in its flavor; it grows upon smaller plants that crawl along the ground and rarely survive harvesting. The hybrids have the best qualities of both, able to climb buildings, and birthing prodigious quantities of fruit; indeed, a hundred years ago taco vines covered most buildings in the southwest, like a nourishing ivy. Wild tacos are almost extinct in Europe; the plants (being less hardy than the American variety) were picked to death outside of a small population in the Pyrenees.
Another species, Taconus subafricanus, is widespread in Sub-Saharan Africa. Many argue that the African Taco should more properly be considered a variety of T. europeanus, though the plants are quite different in appearance. The African Taco grows as a small shrub, and its fruit is much smaller than that of T. europeanus, generally growing to no more than two or three inches in length. African Tacos have reddish rather than beige skin, and grow in small bunches. Some attempts have been made to establish them as a food crop, but the plants seem to be touchier and more difficult to grow.
How to grow tacos yourself
Just like the tomato, tacos are now widely available in grocery stores year-round, either grown in hothouses or shipped when only partially ripe from Argentina. Most people, indeed, have never tasted a truly fresh, ripe taco, and only know the tougher flavorless tacos sold in stores (and occasionally, heaven forfend, frozen.) It's indeed convenient to purchase tacos outside of their limited harvest season, but to those who've tasted real tacos, the factory-farmed variety don't compare.
Fortunately, if you live in the southern United States or anywhere else with mild winters, hot summers, and plenty of sunshine, the taco is relatively easy to grow. It can be hard to find seedlings at garden shops, so the easiest method is to obtain a cutting from a friend. If that's not possible, with a little bit of patience you can generally grow a vine from a taco fruit. Start in early spring. Take a taco, and use toothpicks or chopsticks to suspend it in a jar of water, and leave it on a sunny windowsill until roots form and green shoots appear. This is not a reliable method, so be prepared to try several times before one takes. Plant it in soil, in a pot, and continue watering it until a fairly tough-looking vine begins to sprout; this may take as much as three weeks. At that point, you can plant it in the earth outside. Find a very sunny spot, and again water it frequently; before long, the lovely taco vine (quite decorative in its own right) will begin to climb upwards on a brick wall or a trellis.
The plants are quite low-maintenance as long as you plant them in an appropriate climate. Be prepared, though - even one vine will produce more tacos than you can eat. Fortunately, you will never have trouble giving away the excess. After they've been open for a few days, and guacamole has covered the flesh, they're ready to pick. By this point it should take little more than cupping your hand around the taco to pursuade the plant to give it up. If it takes more force than that, it means the taco is still not quite ripe. Once they are ripe, though, pick them immediately, because they will drop off the vine within a day or so. The skin will be quite soft, but an enzymatic process that begins with picking will cause it to harden into the more familiar crispy exterior within a couple hours, so leave them in the kitchen for a short time if you prefer hard tacos.
If (like me) you live north of the taco's preferred climate, you have two choices. If you can find a good greengrocer, convince him to let you know when the ripest, freshest tacos are available, shipped from no further than necessary. Your other option is to grow them indoors. Dwarf varieties exist that can be grown in a large pot on a balcony (take them inside for winter!) or even in a very sunny window. Again, they are climbing plants; I've rigged a bit of chicken wire for my own dwarf taco (or taquito), and at this very moment I sit in its shadow.
Some of the tacos, if you grow them yourself, will be badly bruised or even broken open, but fret not. Take these sad damaged tacos, excise the injured sections, and break them up into a bowl. Add some greens and you've got one of summer's simplest pleasures, a taco salad. Should you have such an abundance of tacos that you simply cannot eat them all, there are traditional recipes for taco wine, a bubbly, lightly alcoholic beverage created by fermenting the fruit. However, that is a matter for another node.
As one of the most wonderful, unique plants in existence, I sorely wish the taco had the respect it deserved - it merits a better fate than to be an afterthought at fast food restaurants. If more people had tried the beautiful, fragrant, intoxicating taco at its best, then again they would grow outside every house in the South.
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