Welcome to our series featuring Food Holidays: National Soft Taco Day. I have a question for you. Do yu prefer Soft Taco’s or Crunchy Tacos and why? Charlie likes either as long as its a Taco. I like Crunchy more but I will eat Soft Tacos. David prefers Soft Tacos but will eat Crispy Tacos with me.
National Soft Taco Day
Consider National Taco Day, October 4th every year, as a intensified version of “Taco Tuesdays” when restaurants offer in a bid to bring in Happy Hour-like crowds. To further whet your appetite for the subject, get this: the phrase “Taco Tuesday” was actually trademarked across the Country in 1989 by a Wyoming-based fast-food chain called Taco John’s, except in New Jersey, where the trademark had already been claimed by Gregory’s Restaurant & Bar back in ‘82.
Nobody needs to worry about the legality of what their dinner is called. On National Taco Day, we only need to grab Tortillas and stuff them with fillings, from the traditional Carne Asada, Cheese, Tomato, Lettuce and Sour Cream, to more exotic delights like Fish, Chorizo, even Tongue, to name a few of the “Meat component” alternatives. Even the word “stuff” is no accident; many believe that the word Taco derives from the Spanish “ataco,” meaning “to stuff.”
When is National Taco Day 2022?
National Taco Day is celebrated on October 4th every year in the U.S. There are some previous mentions of Taco Day being celebrated on May 3rd, but that is no longer the case. In Mexico, Día del Taco (Day of the Taco) is celebrated on March 31st.
History of National Taco Day
The Anthropologist and historian Arturo Warman (1937 — 2003) specialized in prehistoric Mexican culture for much of his career. Arturo Warman was cited as saying that it was the Aztecs and Mayans who hybridized wild grasses beginning around 3,000 BC to produce the large, nutritious kernels we now know as Corn. We feel fine marking that time as the true beginning of the Taco as foodstuff, because the Corn Tortilla became such a versatile part of Mexican cuisine so quickly. Spreading far and wide and only increasing in the number of aficionados, some of whose descendants are of course Taco-loving foodies of today.
We’re not sure if the calendar day was October 4th that Conquistador Hernando Cortez mentioned the native Flatbread “Tlaxcalli” in a letter to Spain’s King Charles V, but the year was 1520 and it was then that Cortez and his fellows dubbed the food “Tortilla.”
From that point forward, it was inevitable that advances in both culinary Science and communications would bring Taco exploding onto dining-room tables across the globe. By 1914, Californian cookbooks had begun to include Taco recipes. In the following decades, Taco has fully lived up to its definition akin to the generic term “sandwich” and became a legend.
Thank you,
Glenda, Charlie and David Cates
