Taco de Chicharrón en Salsa Verde

It is a breakfast taco before it is anything else, the one a market stand or a corner cocina económica ladles out from a warm pot through the morning. Chicharrón en salsa verde is pork crackling that has been cooked soft in a green sauce until it gives up its crunch, spooned onto a small corn tortilla with raw onion and cilantro over the top. The corn tortilla is warmed on the comal and doubled, because the filling runs wet and one round soaks through. The salsa is the green one, sharp and a little vegetal, and it is what the dish is named and built around. Eaten with a coffee or an atole standing at the stand, it is one of the most ordinary tacos in the country and one of the most reached for.

The salsa is tomatillo, the small green husk fruit that is more sour than a tomato and not at all the same thing. Tomatillos go in with green chile, white onion, and garlic, blistered on the comal or boiled soft, then blended into a loose bright sauce that runs tart and grassy. Roasting the tomatillos first rounds the sauce and deepens it; boiling them keeps it sharper and greener. Either way the green and the redder roja version, built on dried chiles instead, taste like two different tacos off the same pork.

That acidity is doing the real work. The pork crackling is essentially fat and salt, dense and rich, and a sauce this tart is what keeps a tortilla of it from eating like a spoonful of warm lard. The tomatillo's sourness scrubs the fat back between bites; the cilantro pushes the green note further; the raw onion adds a clean sharp bite against the soft. Take the salsa to a sweeter, rounder place and the filling turns heavy and cloying fast. The balance is narrow, and a stand that nails it has a line.

The crackling has to be simmered to the right give and not past it. Hard, brittle chicharrón goes into the hot salsa and slowly bends, swells, and drinks the sauce, the rind turning chewy-tender and the attached fat going soft and spoonable over ten or twenty minutes. Stop too soon and there are shards that cut the gum and read as stale snack; cook too long and the whole thing slumps into a greasy paste with no texture left to chew. The salsa has to stay thick enough to hold on the tortilla rather than running off the edge into the hand. A good one lands the crackling soft but still with a little resistance, the fat carried and cut by the acid rather than sitting heavy.

The smell off the pot is pork fat and the sharp green of cooked tomatillo, a little sour, a little funky from the rendered rind. The filling on the tortilla is glossy and pale green, the crackling gone dark and slack in it. The first bite is soft and rich and immediately cut by the salsa's tartness, the fat coating the mouth and the acid scrubbing it back, the raw onion snapping through. The doubled corn tortilla holds warm and pliable and tastes of toasted maize under the wet pork. It is a messy taco, eaten leaning forward over the plate so the salsa drips clear of the shirt, and the second one is ordered before the first is finished.

The same filling is built two ways depending on the pork, and the distinction is worth knowing. Plain chicharrón en salsa uses the puffed or crackling rind simmered down. Chicharrón prensado is the denser pressed block of meaty scraps and fat saved from the bottom of the carnitas or lard pot, stewed the same way into a richer, funkier filling, and many stands use it interchangeably. Both run in salsa verde or roja. The crackling stewed in green sauce is also the engine of other forms: it fills the gordita's split masa pocket, rolls into a burrito in the wheat-tortilla north, and folds with cheese into a quesadilla, the taco being only the plainest of its outlets.

What carries it everywhere is that it is cheap and it travels. The filling is made from what is left after pork is rendered, it holds for days, and it keeps its character spooned warm from a pot, which is exactly the profile a roving food needs. That is how it became the standard filling of the tacos de canasta, the steamed basket tacos a vendor pre-fills, stacks in a cloth-lined basket, and sells from the back of a bicycle through a neighbourhood, the pork already soft in the salsa and only getting softer in the warm basket as the morning goes on.

Origin and history

The dish has no inventor, but its most documented home is a single town. Tacos de canasta, the basket-taco format that carries chicharrón en salsa across central Mexico, trace to San Vicente Xiloxochitla in Tlaxcala, about ten kilometres southwest of the state capital, which calls itself la cuna del taco de canasta, the cradle of the basket taco. The format grew there in the 1950s out of field workers' food, tortillas dipped in oil and packed warm, and the town built an industry on it; by various estimates more than half of Xiloxochitla's families now make tacos de canasta, many travelling daily into Mexico City to sell them.

The filling itself is older and humbler than any of that and belongs to the logic of using the whole pig. Chicharrón en salsa, green or red, is a standing Mexican breakfast and lunch dish built from the crackling and pressed scraps left after rendering lard, the cheapest useful thing the rendering pot produces, stewed soft in sauce and eaten with beans and tortillas. It is documented as a quintessential everyday taco filling that turns up equally in burritos, sopes, and tortas, the same pork moving across every corn and wheat format the country has.

The cradle town now marks the connection on the calendar. The dish that began as a way to use the scrapings of the lard pot is fed today, basket by basket, into a city of millions from the place that built an industry on keeping it warm. San Vicente Xiloxochitla has honoured that on the first Sunday of every December since 2007, holding an annual feria del taco de canasta in the small Tlaxcalan town, in Natívitas, that supplies the capital its morning baskets.