Of all the foreign influences on California’s foodways, the Mexican contribution is the most important. Taco recipes appeared in California cookbooks beginning in 1914. Bertha Haffner-Ginger’s California Mexican-Spanish Cook Book: Selected Mexican and Spanish Recipes (1914) described tacos as being “made by putting chopped cooked beef and chili sauce in tortilla made of meal and flour; folded, edges sealed together with egg; fried in deep fat, chile sauce served over it.” Another Californian, Pauline Wiley-Kleemann, featured six taco and taquito (small taco) recipes in her Ramona’s Spanish-Mexican Cookery (1929). During the twentieth century, a distinctive so-called Cal-Mex cookery evolved. A dish from Los Angeles, dated 1905, consisted of avocado chunks, olive oil, and minced onion served on a bed of lettuce. This very basic guacamole was elaborated upon as the years went by and by the early 2000s had become one of the signal dishes of Cal-Mex cuisine. The stuffed tortilla called a burrito, which means literally “little burro,” first appeared on a menu in Los Angeles’s famed El Cholo Spanish Café in the 1930s. Perhaps unique to the Cal-Mex tradition is the seafood taco.
