Hard-shell taco

While many different versions of hard-shell tacos exist, the most common form of the hard-shell taco is served as a U-shaped crisp-fried corn tortilla filled with seasoned ground beef, cheese, lettuce, and sometimes tomato, onion, salsa, sour cream, and avocado or guacamole. Such tacos are sold by restaurants and by fast food chains, while kits are readily available in most supermarkets. Hard shell tacos are sometimes known as tacos dorados ("golden tacos") in Spanish, a name that they share with taquitos, a similar dish. == History ==

Various sources credit different individuals with the invention of the hard-shell taco, but some form of the dish likely predates all of them. An early appearance of a description of the taco in English was in a 1914 cookbook, California Mexican-Spanish Cookbook by Bertha Haffner Ginger. By the late 1930s, companies such as Ashley Mexican Food and Absolute Mexican Foods were selling appliances and ingredients for cooking hard shell tacos, and the first patents for hard-shell taco cooking appliances were filed in the 1940s. Juvencio Maldonado, a restaurant owner from Oaxaca living in New York, is sometimes credited as the original inventor of a hard shell taco-making machine, and received a patent for it in 1950. In the mid-1950s, Glen Bell opened Taco Tia, and began selling a simplified version of the tacos being sold by Mexican restaurants in San Bernardino, particularly the tacos dorados being sold by Lucia and Salvador Rodriguez across the street from another of Bell's restaurants. At this time, Los Angeles was racially segregated, and the hard-shell tacos sold at Bell's restaurants were many white Americans' first introduction to Mexican food. == See also ==