There are two different stories about the origin of the pambazo. Here’s the romantic one: When Empress Carlota arrived in Mexico with her Habsburg husband, Maximilian I, they brought along their Hungarian chef, Josef Tüdös. He created a new dish for the Empress by adding Hungarian-style paprika and potatoes to traditional Mexican ingredients, including three elements meant to invoke the Mexican flag: white queso fresco, green lettuce, and a bright red sandwich roll made from dipping bread into guajillo pepper mole (the key ingredient in traditional enchilada sauce) and frying it. He named it the Empress’s Caprice.
The second origin story is the opposite of this froufrou royal romanticism. During the hardest days of Spanish rule, Mexican bakers would take the low-quality flour left over after making fine white bread and bake it into rolls called pan basso, or low bread, that were sold in separate bakeries for the poor called panbassaria. The cheap flour made for mighty chewy loaves, and thus the tradition of soaking and frying this particular bread to make it more palatable.
This sounds the more likely origin, since it’s the common story for some of the world’s best dishes – humble food made from low-quality ingredients but elevated with innovative techniques and seasoning. Pambazo has its regional variations—you can put just about anything in it as long as you are dipping and frying the bread in that bright red sauce. The most popular variation uses chorizo with potatoes and is associated with Mexico City.
As a native Californian and admirer of Mexican cuisine, I was surprised to realize that I’d never heard of the pambazo until I saw it mentioned by the journalist Talia Lavin in her weird, lovely side project The Sword and the Sandwich, an essay collection (soon to be a book) in which she is working her way through the Wikipedia list of notable sandwiches. I immediately went to Google Maps and typed in ‘pambazo’. The nearest hit was on 200 S, six blocks from my office.
This turned out to be at a recently opened restaurant called House of Corn that had a previous, and apparently well-loved, iteration in Sandy. It sounds better in Spanish, Casa de Maíz. I won’t say I broke any traffic laws, but I got there in pretty good time and sat down to order my first pambazo with the traditional chorizo and potato mix. A few minutes later, a toasted red sandwich appeared, dripping melted queso down its sides.
Another food origin story that may not be entirely true is the one about the French dip sandwich. Supposedly, a customer walked into Philippe’s, a sandwich shop in Los Angeles, in 1908. They ordered a roast beef sandwich, but the cook accidentally dropped the bread into a pan of beef drippings. The customer told him to just go ahead and serve it, and then declared the resulting sandwich to be delicious, starting a trend that continues to this day—Philippe’s is a deep memory from my childhood that I refresh whenever I’m back in LA.
That’s what the pambazo reminded me of—that crisp toasty texture you get when you dip cheap bread in an oily liquid and then fry it. With the pambazo, the guajillo sauce also provides spice and heat to an otherwise tasteless roll, and the firming up of the bread by frying it makes it an excellent platform for the fillings to come.
House of Corn nailed those fillings, with a yummy potato-laced chorizo, fresh lettuce and salsa, and all that glorious melted cheese. But the star of the show is that delicious, crusty, brightly colored bread, the Mexican equivalent of the buttery garlic slice they give you to sop up your plate at an old-school red sauce Italian place. House of Corn is a restaurant that prides itself on its house-made tortillas, but they’ve also perfected another delivery device for those goodies you might otherwise find in a street taco—a piece of lowly bread, elevated by dipping it and frying it into a sandwich fit for an empress.
If You Go
House of Corn
414 E 200 South, SLC
houseofcornusa.com
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