Trader Vic’s Book of Mexican Cooking (1973) – Chicken Tacos

Bergeron, Victor Jules. Trader Vic’s Book of Mexican Cooking. Garden City, NY: Doubleday &, 1973. P 40. Print. [TX716 .M4 847 1973]

By Alexandria Villalobos, an undergraduate nutrition student at UTSA

Chicken Tacos

• 1 large onion, finely chopped
  2 teaspoons of oil
  2 cups coarsely chopped cooked chicken
  1 cup Red Enchilada Sauce
  ½ teaspoon salt
  12 tacos (4-inch tortillas), fried and shaped

Sauté onions in oil until limp; add chopped chicken and mix well. Add Red Enchilada Sauce and salt; let simmer until mixture is almost dry. Fill prepared tacos and garnish as for beef tacos in preceding recipe.

Makes 6 servings, allowing 2 tacos per serving.

Garnishes:
1 ½ cups of shredded lettuce
1 cup grated cheddar cheese
½ cup of sliced radishes
1 cup of Salsa Cruda (see index)

In the Kitchen:

Before getting ready to make these chicken tacos, I read over my recipe one more time. I thought it would be a quick and easy task. The recipe was vague on how to prepare what I needed, so I had to figure it out on my own.

First, it called for cooked chicken so I boiled 4 chicken breasts. Instead of chopping the chicken, I shredded it. While the breasts were on the stove boiling, I chopped up the onions and put them in a pan with oil to sauté. After I completely shredded the chicken, I added it, along with salt, to the onions and mixed them together before adding the enchilada sauce. Even though it listed enchilada sauce as an ingredient, the recipe wasn’t very clear on what the sauce was supposed to be made of. Since I hadn’t looked to see if the book had a recipe for enchilada sauce while I was at the library, I substituted a pre-made red enchilada sauce I found at my local grocery store. I then added the sauce to the chicken and onions on low heat making sure the pan was covered to let it simmer until most of the sauce had evaporated. This process took about 45 minutes.

While the chicken was simmering, I had issues with preparing the tortillas. Frying tortillas in oil and simultaneously trying to shape them was very difficult for me, so after trying to make a few of them I decided to substitute the tortillas with premade taco shells. Since I made this recipe for my family as our dinner, we also added some of our own garnishes, which included sour cream, guacamole, lettuce, salsa, and we substituted the radishes for tomatoes. We also had Mexican rice and refried beans as our side dishes.