A New Toy

Last weekend we had lunch in Queens, at the Jackson Diner on 74th Street, which serves cheap and heavenly Indian food from a buffet. On my first visit I stood out from the crowd as someone who did not look Indian, but by now the clientele had turned into a mixture of liberal grannies, hungover hipsters and local families.

Jackson Heights holds a mini-Bombay about a block in size, where the sari shops compete for customers, the gold is satsuma-yellow, the spice selections of the grocers are quite fantastic, and desis, the people of the Indian subcontinent, rummage through the works of Amitabh Bachchan and other Bollywood stars in cardboard boxes on the pavement. The area quickly melts into a mini-Bangladesh, halal butchers and Koranic verses made of gilded plastic. And then, in the blink of an eye, the whole Subcontinent is left behind: the next twenty-odd blocks are Latin America, in the order Ecuador, Colombia, Peru and Mexico.

On the trip to Mexico I became addicted to fragrant corn tortillas, and ever since I have lusted after a tortilla press of my own. In Mexico City I had watched, at a pavement restaurant, a teenage girl pat corn dough into balls and flatten them in a press between plastic bags. I picked up a heavy cast-iron press of Colombian make for 12 dollars in Jackson Heights, at a Latin American household goods shop on Roosevelt Avenue somewhere around 90th Street.

I once tried making corn tortillas myself in Helsinki, with dismal results. No wonder, because making corn tortillas takes a special lime-treated flour, and a dough made from ordinary maize flour will not hold together. The shortcut to tortillas is maseca, which is dried tortilla dough. Here it is to be found in every corner bodega.

Maseca tortillas turn out better than the lifeless long-life tortillas that come in plastic bags, but the smell of corn could be stronger. The tastiest tortilla would be the result of a laborious process handed down from the Aztecs. Every Mexican eats 15 tortillas a day on average. Producing that amount of flour with a hand mortar takes four hours each day.

Sybille Bedford's excellent travel book about Mexico after the Second World War tells of a hard-up Eastern European emigrant family who had fled Nazi Germany for the muddy back alleys of Coyoacán, Frida Kahlo's home town, and had to hire a couple of servants to cope with everyday life in the new country. Although the servants were taught to bake bread the European way, they preferred to stick to their traditional foods, and so four servants of their own had to be hired for the servants, to turn the stone mills so that everyone would be kept in tortillas.

The usual way to use tortillas (flour tortillas will do as well) is to make soft tacos out of them - do you remember, brother, those Sonoran tacos from the snack stand last summer? In Sonora, I gather, tortillas are mostly made of wheat anyway. The filling is strips of beef fried quickly, salad onion, fresh coriander and plenty of red-chilli salsa picante. To finish, the tacos are salted energetically and lime is squeezed over them, as was done in Mexico to every dish set on the table.

Recipe card

Corn Tortillas

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• 8 tortillas
• Kneading 3 min
• Baking 30 s + about 1 min per tortilla

You will need

200 ml	lime-treated maize flour (maseca or masa harina)
about 110 ml	water

Method

1. Mix the water into the maseca and knead for 3 minutes. If the dough feels dry, add water 1/2-1 tbsp at a time. The aim is a silky, springy ball that does not crumble in the fingers but does not stick to them either.
2. Roll the dough into 8 smooth lumps the size of golf balls and leave them to wait under a dampened sheet of kitchen paper.
3. Fold in half a sheet of baking paper twice the size of the tortilla press. Lay it in the press so that the sheet opens towards the hinge of the press.
4. Put a ball of maseca between the layers of baking paper, a couple of centimetres from the centre of the press towards the hinge, press it flat, and flatten it further by pressing the press shut.
5. Rub the baking paper between your fingers so that the tortilla comes loose.
6. Bake on a dry cast-iron pan, hot almost to the point of smoking, first for 30 seconds, turn, bake the other side for about a minute, turn again, and lift onto a plate inside a towel to wait for serving.

Recipe card

Tacos de carne asada

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You will need

	corn tortillas (flour tortillas will do as well)
	strips of beef
	cooking oil
	chopped salad onion
	fresh coriander
	red-chilli salsa picante
	salt
	lime wedges

Method

1. Fry the strips of beef quickly in cooking oil.
2. Spread on each tortilla a spoonful of the meat, chopped salad onion, fresh coriander and plenty of salsa picante.
3. Salt energetically and squeeze juice from the lime wedges over the top.