Who knew the Jews invented flour tortillas? Really

San Antonio Express-News/Houston Chronicle:

Nothing beats a warm breakfast taco in the morning. The ultimate comfort food, it is a culinary mainstay of Texan culture, based on something that is centuries old: the flour tortilla.

In much of Mexico and elsewhere in the United States, tacos are usually made with corn tortillas, whose history goes back even further, thousands of years to the native people of the Americas. The Aztecs revered corn almost as a deity, said Melissa Guerra, of McAllen, an author of several cookbooks, most recently Dishes from the Wild Horse Desert.

The flour tortilla gained a foothold after the Spanish conquest, she said, with the colonizers considering corn unfit for human consumption. There were theological reasons for their preference for wheat, which Europeans associated with the body of Christ.

Jewish families — covertly practicing their faith or simply maintaining their traditions as Catholic conversos — settled in northern Mexico to get as far from the Spanish Inquisition as possible. Since corn was not kosher and they were accustomed to eating flat pita bread, they began to make tortillas out of wheat, Guerra said.

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Now that is something I have never heard before. I don't know enough about kosher food to understand why corn is not kosher. But then I never really understood why kosher eaters were denied the delights of a cheese burger. I am, however a big fan of flour tortillas.