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77, 88 99... I am powerless to stop. Once again, at 11 calories a crunch, the fried tortilla chips I eat while waiting for my low-fat entrée defeat my good intentions. Which is why I, like many other crunchaholics, regarded the advent of the baked tortilla chip as one of the great inventions of this century.
We were only wrong by two millennia. The truth is, toasted tortillas and tortilla chips were probably being served with guacamole and hot sauce in pre-Columbian America– a time of great pyramids, vast empires– and, apparently, low-fat snacks. I stumbled across this piece of tortilla history last summer when I visited an archaeological laboratory in Oaxaca, Mexico, near the site of the Monte Albán ruins.
It was here that the tostada, or toasted tortilla, was served up about 2,000 years ago. The tostada was one of the revolutionary inventions of its day, according to archaeologist Marcus Winter, Ph. D., a researcher in the archaeology section of the Oaxacan Regional Center of the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). The impetus may have been simple preservation. Regular floppy tortillas, made from corn, went bad within a day or so, but if toasted until all their moisture was gone– becoming crunchy tostadas– they could keep for up to a week. In one of those great historical side-effects, the corn-farming culture thereby became mobile. With a basket of tostadas in hand, people could visit distant cities and attend festivals that lasted for several days.
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But after the Spanish invasion of the 16th century introduced lard to Mexico, the tostada changed. For the worse. The modern tostada is fried, and it functions like a little pedestal on which all sorts of other foods are piled. You now see refried beans, chicken, and cheese tostadas at coffee shops, and ceviche-salad tostadas at Mexican beaches. They are outrageously good, but unfortunately very high in fatty calories. So why not go back to the original recipe and toast them instead of frying them?
Sitting there amid the pottery shards with the archaeologists, I came up with a few ideas: baked, not fried, tostadas, inspired by the originals from Monte Albán. We tend to think of cooking techniques that let us eat healthier as a modern trend. What a shock it is to realize that some of the best ideas in low-fat Mexican cooking are older than the millennium we're celebrating today.
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