Food for Thought

Between Santa Cruz on the west and Capitola on the east lies a sort of unincorporated no man's land called Live Oak. Years ago Live Oak was funk incarnate: it was a neighborhood of old houses on large lots, big vegetable and begonia gardens tended by elderly Italians, cars up on blocks in the driveways, and hound dogs on chains. And lots and lots of trailer courts. Retirees, surfers, and feral locals claimed Live Oak as their primal stomping ground.

The old trailer courts are still there, and the retirees and working folks who live in them. But the rest of Live Oak has gone more urban. I wouldn't say gentrified, but.... instead of the howling hound dogs and dead cars of yore you'll find spiffy SUVs and 1.5 cats per household.

And the large old lots and gardens have been broken up for townhome complexes and planned unit developments with private streets.

And yet -- Live Oak still has Ferrell's Donuts. Some things don't change.

Ferrell's is a local donut chain that isn't a chain anymore. The shops have all gone their separate ways under separate owners. The Ferrell's stores in Santa Cruz are laid out like any fast food joint, with a long counter and a symmetrical arrangement of plastic tables. And they are beloved of students needing a late-night caffeine- and sugar rush to finish overdue term papers.

But the Live Oak Ferrell's Donuts has got the classic U-shaped donut shop counters -- two of them in fact, in traditional brown wood-grain formica, with padded stools upholstered in vinyl. There are no private tables; eat at the counter with everybody else or take it to go, you poser.

The Live Oak Ferrell's ("Original Ferrell's," it calls itself) also has classic donut shop patrons: old people. Old people who just sit there with a coffee and a maple bar for hour after hour, chatting. About something. Nobody knows what.

Ferrell's is no dive, far from it. It's clean, well-maintained, even cozy; no scuff marks on the floor, no rips or stains in the upholstered stools. And the coffee is supreme. But the place is -- well, old-fashioned with a vengeance. Even the pastry is old-school. In Original Ferrell's, the last 40 years of popular culture do not exist.

Want a croissant? Maybe a brioche? In your dreams, Frenchy boy! How about a custard bar instead? Or a cruller? Or a raised glazed? An apple turnover? Or a jelly donut? All laid out like precious objects in the glass display case, gleaming with sugar icing and sprinkles and gut-busting, deep-fried, heavier-than-lead American goodness.


All incredibly familiar. Except for... that thing...


"Excuse me miss, is that a burrito?" It looked to be a flour tortilla, rolled up, deep-fried and covered with sugar icing. It lay in the display case among several just like it.

"That's right. There's raspberry-filled and apple-filled."

"Ummmmm..." I really don't eat donuts anymore. Nothing against the taste; I'm just to the age where fried pastry settles in my stomach like boat anchors. But this was research.

"Apple," I decided finally.

"Good choice," the clerk said, bagging one up.

I took it home and studied it. They had taken a flour tortilla, covered it with a layer of apple pie filling, rolled the thing up and dropped it into a fry vat. Then they smeared sugar icing on top and it was show time.


I tried it. It was -- odd. Crispy on the outside, strangely chewy on the inside where the hot fat couldn't work its magic on the tortilla. But it tasted like an apple pie.

But what exactly was this thing? Flour tortilla, deep-fried, fruit-filling... it finally came to me. Somebody had invented the apple chimichanga.

A chimichanga is a deep-fried burrito, a Tex-Mex creation out of Arizona 80 or 90 years ago. So a chimichanga is a cross-cultural culinary mutant to start with. And once food starts to mutate, it doesn't stop. One day, in some panaderia/taqueria somebody brought in a can of apple pie mix and looked thoughtfully at a tortilla. And a deep fryer was just sitting there...

I went out on the Internet and found hundreds of references to apple chimichangas, hundreds more to apple burritos. Mainly from down along the border in Arizona and New Mexico and Texas, the chimichanga homeland.

But now spreading north from there to Los Angeles, Fresno, and finally Original Ferrell's Donuts in Live Oak, that stalwart bastion of the past that isn't so change-resistant after all. Maybe brought north in the mind of a Mexican donut cook who decided to show his new boss how they did things down south in Tucson.

But you know, turnabout is fair play. Because in researching all this chimichanga lore on Wikipedia, that fascinating database of the profound and the trivial, I found out that the burrito as we know it in California -- the aluminum-wrapped fat-to-bursting bean-and-rice-and-cheese-stuffed bomber that we all love --was born in San Francisco's Mission District in the '60s, wildly mutated from the original, more sedate meat-only Mexican burrito.

And this San Francisco mutant burrito was then sent forth southwards and eastwards to LA and San Diego and Arizona and beyond (where it's called California-style).

We live among so much social change, so much cultural migration, that we can't even see it. Historians will note it, but to us right now it's just the way things are, and hey, where did all those Latinos in the neighborhood come from, and what do you mean, your brother and his family moved to Costa Rica?

But you can see it in the food. That's the one thing you can't ignore, because it's food, the staff of life. Whether it's an apple chimichanga in Live Oak, a San Francisco-style burrito in Tucson, or a bottle of El Tapatio sauce (aka Mexican Worchestershire) next to the parmesan cheese shaker in a Santa Cruz pizzeria.

The waves of change move constantly all directions. And they cross each other constantly, collide, and richocet back to where they came from. Chicago deep-dish pizza, turkey linguica, burrito bowls, bagel dogs, egg roll on a stick, Belgian chocolate with chili peppers, Thai chicken wraps, Spam sushi, Cleveland three-way chili: the beat goes on! And if that's what's happening to the food, think about what's going on in the cultures it comes from... deep under the surface.

This evening Rhumba and I stopped for burritos at Los Pericos, a superior Santa Cruz taqueria manned by dark-skinned Spanish-speakers. I had just paid for our burritos when I saw the sign on the wall: NEW! BLT burrito with avocado.

Damn, I am SO trying that next time.

And another wave crashes on the cultural shore. Pass the El Tapatio, willya?