Think Of Any Dish You Love As a Verb
How context can fix you to a place.
There’s a small carnicería not far from our house here in Tucson: its butcher’s case full of achiote-stained chicken marinating in boneless strips, shreds of flap meat, tripe, pork steaks sliced thin across the shoulder. On weekends, one guy, sometimes with a helper, sets up a table-shaped grill in the parking strip out front—under a folding canopy when the temperature is especially brutal—and works, his body wreathed in smoke, moving mostly thin-sliced steak around with tongs.
His grill burns mesquite charcoal, for sure, since mesquite, gray and gnarled, have always abounded in this region, stretching for hundreds of miles to the south. And carne asada—the heat of mesquite implied; taken for granted—is the signal taste of Sonora, the Mexican state just across the border. Tucson was Sonoran long before it was Arizonan.
Sonoran culture, a mix of indigenous and Spanish colonial ways, seeped into the desert here like the summer monsoon rains. Tucson’s crowds of snowbirds—part-time residents from the Great Lakes, predominantly, who overwinter in this town and its gated, golf-course peripheries—seem literally superficial, floating resolutely above the desert on roadways and SUV radials, popping into Safeway for shrinkwrap New York strips and a case of Bud. But the guy who grills next to the carnicería: he feels original; he feels rooted, despite his obviously nomadic gig in parking lots.
Two and a half years ago, when Perry and I moved here from California, carne asada was the thing that most blew my mind. I’d known it in early-2000s Oakland taco truck culture as thin steak cooked on a griddle, seared with any luck, uniformly gray otherwise; or in SF burrito places, charred on a gas grill. One of the first lunches I bought us to go, in the pre-vaccine time of takeout only, was a carne asada plate from Aqui Con El Nene on Tucson’s west side. When I flipped open the Styro box at home what I had was a thin steak from the back end of the chuck (diezmillo, a.k.a. blade steak), not flamboyantly or even reasonably tender, but browned and smoky, with the resiny sweetness of mesquite. A fat chile güero, also grilled; a cebollita whose blackening unlocked its sweetness, allowing it to swell into something lush and smoky.
I’m certain this is not even the best carne asada in or near Tucson, but best-ofs are for tourists. My unexpected initiation into carne asada made me suspect I hadn’t discovered a dish, but stumbled on a culture, for which Tucson represents, I supposed, the northern edge.
In Planet Taco, Jeffrey M. Pilcher says much to illuminate the history and stubborn popularity of carne asada. I could read the history, know about the Spanish introduction of beef cattle to Sonora; also wheat from southern Spain; and about the previously nomadic native people compelled to take up farming and tend the strange lumbering animals from Europe. Still, here, on the ground, it seemed to elude me, something essential about carne asada, the cultural place where it developed and holds emblematic sway.
It wasn’t until I read Felipe Garcia, director of Visit Tucson, that I began to understand what I was missing. I was thinking of carne asada as a dish, a taste, maybe even a recipe. What I’d only sensed, but couldn’t quite come to, is that carne asada is a broader context. On his blog, Felipe explains how it’s really a verb:
Suppose you have a friend that sends you a WhatsApp message and tells you “lets have a carne asada in my house this Saturday at 1pm.” Don't expect to show up at 1pm and enter your friends house where she/he will have a pan with grilled meat, tortillas and salsa. You will show up at 1pm..ish... and you will smell that amazing flavors coming out of a grill. Tomatoes and chiles are at the grill being charred to do a salsa. The meat will be in the kitchen, waiting for the right moment to be transferred into the grill. You get a cold beer and congregate around the grill with the rest of your friends. Some appetizers will be on a side table (but you don't indulge, you wait of the main event). There is no set schedule. Once the coals are ready, someone will go inside and bring out the meat. Your host will grill the meat with just some sea salt. You keep chatting about life, smelling the delicious grilled meat, and maybe helping smash some avocados for a guacamole or cut some limes. All of a sudden the meat is ready. Your hosts pulls it out of the grill into a chopping block and cuts the meat into pieces. Some tortillas go on the grill, and then everyone builds their tacos. Maybe you will seat at the table to eat, or you will just remain standing while eating your carne asada tacos… This is the whole concept of “hacer una carne asada…” The “carne asada” is not only the grilled meat, it is the whole experience of conviviality.
Argentina’s parillada, the grand aïoli of old Provence, laab in Isaan villages: sprawling dishes with a participatory, performative element, natural for celebrating affinity or building it—for buttressing the structure of family, however you define it. Can such a dish also root you to a place?
At my carnicería, you buy what you want at the counter and take it outside for the asado man: leave your purchase on the folding table he’s set up, a queue of white plastic bags waiting for grill space to free. The conviviality in an old, old system, the intimacy of history, always present here—you can touch it through the thinnest of membranes, as fragile and resilient as the face of the desert. Mesquite smoke gets in your shirt and on your skin. On all of us who stick around here long enough to soak it in. #