Outrageous Claim #1: Del Taco and the Crinkle Cut French Fry
By Budiak
Here today (and everyday hereonafter thanks to the internet) we're going to discuss
(I'm going to tell you) something that came to my attention the last time I was
surveying (shamefully eating at) a local Del Taco restaraunt. I saw how they sold
French fries (french cut, fried potatoes) with their mexican food. I know what you're thinking.
A bold move.
Yes. A very, very bold move, indeed, my friend. But look closer at their packaging and you'll
notice something so bold that it borders on brash. I'll show you an image to illustrate my point.
Do you see the lies? Do you see the deception?? No?! I'll spell it out for you, then!
The gall! This is exactly why I, Budiak, have taken it upon myself to concoct the ONLY possible
way that Del Taco invented and solely purveys, in fast-food format, the crinkle cut French Fry.
It seems to me, looking back into the past with not even the use of a simple scrying
dish, that it happened some time in the early 1900s...
So it Begins...
The year was 1926. The times were tough. As Al Capone dodged bullets, Castro lay
crying in swaddling clothes and Harry Houdini lay dying, a young antiquarian
named Lucious Adlai Humphrey Del Taco III, IV
flees the midwest towards the west for peddling un-dyed cough syrup in Kansas City.
He knew that he was going to be long on the run when, on a stop in San Leandro, he had bet the local constables that the
New San Angeles Trolley Dodgers could give a hefty wallop to the Chicagoan Ivory Stocking Club.
After the Boys handed over a hefty drubbing to the Dodgers (or, Trolleys as they called them),
he skipped town, not being able to pay the outrageous sum of seven dollars sterling for his
poor judgement.
He made his way towards Juarez, Mexico, where he then set up shop with his many
delightful wares and reliquaries. He stayed there for some town, sending
wired correspondences to his chums in 'El Norte', though he never knew if
they got through, because he didn't speak any Spanish and the telegraph operator
didn't speak any English. But still, he persisted, assuming that his motto would
carry him through the day. The motto being, of course, 'It'll all come out in the wash!'.
But young Lucious III,IV wouldn't let the mere languishing heat and oppressive lack
of sports bookies keep him down. Being a scrappy lad of exceptional heritage, he
took advantage of his lush surroundings and started a small potato farm, tending the
subterranean crops and making his world famous 'Piping Hot Preparation of
Tomato Bisque and Frenched-fried-potatoes.' Of course, being as resourceful as I am,
I was able to track down the recipe for this dish and have prepared it for your viewing
pleasure, and as a window...into the past!
Ahh, yes, it was the wild 20s and things were simply smashing. Business was good, the
music was tinny, as they liked it, and everything happened as if underwater.
'How's it goin' today, Mr Tres Quattro?" the little Mexican children would say
to him. (Tres Quattro means 'Three Four' in Il Spanio (Spanish, they called it)).
'Right damply' he'd respond with a tip of his cap, as he looked up from his
garden work ('tater toilin's, he called it).
Life wasn't a free ride, though. Things started to change rapidly in 20s, and as the
changes in technology grew faster by the second (far outpacing the advances in potato
technology), young Lucious Adlai was visited by a long lost friend.
One day whilst busying himself with 'tater toilin's, a great rumbling occupied young,
industrious Adlai's notice. He looked up to see a great machine-beast rolling and bouncing and
creaking up the road, with gigantic thin wheels banging off of every nook and cranny
of the dirt road, spitting gravel and dust at a frightfully increasing rate.
He stood up, grabbing his stout metal rake, readying himself with the Lord's prayer for the inevitable battle
to the death. Just as he felt the machine was going to overtake him, his autonomous
antagonist screeched and bumped to a stop, which allowed six miles of dust and dirt
and grime to catch up and fill the area with a choking brown fog.
Time stood still. The fog began to clear, and just as Lucious's heart was about to
pound a bloody hole through his surprisingly clean white shirt, the hatch opened
on the machine and up from the cockpit stood none other than his best friend; a
friend whose friendship could span several lifetimes.
It was none other than Smacky Harrington himself.
Yes, that's right, Smacky Harrington had finally found Lucious. He stood in brown pilot's
pants, with an unneccessarily long scarf and a bomber jacket that lay powerfully upon his broad shoulders
and exclaimed to the world 'I'm far too warm but I'm far too proud to admit it!'
Yes, it was Smacky Harrington, world famous* out-of-work bootlegger and future NASCAR driver,
at least, as everybody knew him. Standing at a heroic 5'6", he was the tallest man from his hometown of
Upstate, NY, this charming scamp had used all of his multifaceted
faculties to find his friend.
The two met graciously and shared daring stories of the past, with Smacky always doing that
weird thing with his eyes that Lucious always hated but never mentioned.
Reminiscence was exuberant but short lived, as there was serious business to attend to.
It seemed that these devices, called automobiles, were the biggest fad since tulips, and
tulip flavored water after that, and then fancy beetles still after that. Yes,
there were definitely some changes that would have to happen.
Strangely enough, the antiques business had never really picked up, since Lucious
never really left his farm because potatoes, shockingly enough, take a modicum of
attention to grow. He did, however, serve his bisque in antique bowls, which was
actually the center of his problem.
But with the proliferation of the automobile, it seemed that everything was becoming portable.
Portable wetbars, portable toilets, portable families, and even portable food. So
Lucious and Smacky got to work, beginning the laborious task of creating a highly portable and
delicious version of his fried potato bisque.
Lucious and Smackie got right to work, concocting variation after variation of his
delicious savory treat. After several months he came to his first breakthrough.
He saw the Mexican women making these strange discs out of corn mash of wild
and varied colors, and they seemed to posess an otherworldly strength which far
exceeded that of his native corn dish, 'creamed corn', which in his earlier trials
merely formed another soup and was hardly portable, unless he had placed it in a
plastic tube which had not yet been invented. He quickly commissioned the ladies to
produce for him twelve gross of the edible devices at the steep price of two pesos.
He prodigiously placed a small bundle of frenched fried potato spears in one of the
discs and smothered it in a healthy helping of his hot, delicious, salty tomato bisque.
After a moment of waiting, it seemed like a success! The contraption was holding together, and
as he raised it to his eager maw disaster struck.
Foiled! The meal went from a delicacy to a demon-seed in mere moments as the bisque
slid effortlessly off of the potato strips and soaked the tortilla, dashing its
integrity upon his shoes and now stained white shirt. There had to be another way.
Things looked grim. The two sat, pondering for months as to what they would do.
They were already seeing some portable foods selling like hotcakes. In the simul-radiocasts
they could pick up from El Norte they heard of marvellous and delicious treats that could
be carried in a car (called cars because early automobiles resembled train cars)
as easily as they could be carried in a horse-and-carriage. Such things as the
Pocket Pie, the 'hot-cake', the Quickie Burger, and the Triple Sausage Lindie, had already beaten them to the market.
They were about to throw in the towel when, on the radiograph, they heard a commercial for the
'Accordion City' store in town, which advertised 'More Musical Fantasticism Per Square Inch,
Guaranteed, or Most of Your Monies Back!'
That was it! They realized that the accordion held not only the key to wondrous music and
melodic escape, but the fuel for their creative fire! The accordion, because of the shape of the
bellows, could hold fifteen times the amount of music as a regular pipe organ, enabling the
musician to effortlessly walk around with his music rather than having to tow his pipe organ behind him on an
African bull elephant, something that Lucious had only seen in animated comedies.
They quickly devised something that was a bold endeavor indeed. If they could create a
potato strip, with the shape of an accordion's bellows, they could potentially hold
15 times as much bisque as the standard pipe organ! They quickly sketched a crude graph
of the relationship between different food-related edibles and gadgetry and their abilities to hold bisque on
a sheet of college-ruled paper, which they had invented that day.
So it seemed that, with the exception of celery, which did not fry well, the crinkle-cut
fry (shortened after a crippling tongue-straining) held the most bisque out of
any of the items they tested. The bowl was discarded as a portable storage unit
because they did not want to become embroiled in myriad lawsuits brought to them
by shirtstained dandies who were angry about their mishandling. Also, the bowl
offered its own problem, which was that in order to safely use a bowl one must use a
spoon, that is, unless he wanted to appear as a shameless savage all snorting and licking
and sucking at his food. The spoon, while it seems honorable enough, holds the greatest
disparity in the entire food family. See on the graph how much bisque the bowl holds. Well,
with that containment potential, why would you use a spoon, which can hardly hold any bisque
at all, to transport the food to your mouth? It was the first ever recorded instance of the
now taken-for-granted 'bottleneck' principle. Yes, they also invented the bottleneck.
With their new invention they quickly assembled the first portable bisque, where there was
no middleman standing between you and your lycopene-laden lusciousness. An image of a recreation
of the original product is displayed below.
Do you see how dramatic that image is, with the heavy vignetting? They invented the vignette
that very day to use in their ad campaign for the original crinkle-cut fries.
Life was easy for some time, as they were able to stop selling potato hotcakes
(which provided the necessary capital to work on their krinkles) and started selling
the crinkle-cut fries; the official title of the dish being 'Smacky and Lucious's Luscious
Preparation of the Crinkle-Cut French Fried Potato Spear and Piping Hot Kentucky Bisque'
which was colloquially refered to as 'taco'. The tacos sold like hotcakes.
Some time later, the dreaded 200 year Mexican Potato famine struck, forcing
Lucious to start using the fresh ground beef and all white-meat shredded marinated chicken, which he had been using
to fertilize his crops, in his tacos. Despite his horror at the idea, the customers loved them.
He made due with bootlegged potatoes from Venezuela that Smacky so skillfully acquired (which actually turned out to be turnips, but nobody
really remembered at that point) in order to continue to make his crinkle cut fries to serve with the tacos.
The combination was a smashing success. Nothing spells authentic Mexican cuisine like a hot chicken taco and
a pile of awkwardly sliced fried potatoes smothered in hot tomato bisque. Soon the great Mexican tomato
famine came, and the bisque was omitted completely...and nobody seemed to notice, so long as the
fries were wavy and the fertilizer was hot, the customers flocked to ol' Lucious.
And so the rest, as they say, is history.
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