Something special happens when you fry tortillas, one at a time, in a pot filled with oil. As Gabrielle Hamilton wrote in one of the most memorable similes of her 2011 memoir, "Blood, Bones & Butter," the tortilla will "float and sizzle on the surface for a moment like a lily pad on a pond." When Hamilton was forming them into edible salad bowls as a teenager at a Pennsylvania restaurant, she writes, the flour tortilla "came up around the bowl like the long dress and underskirts of a Victorian woman who had fallen, fully clothed, into a lake, her skirts billowing up around her heavy sinking body."