49 Fun Facts About Tex-Mex

Which Tex-Mex standard did the Original Mexican Restaurant pioneer in Texas from 1900?

The combination plate began as 'the Regular'. Chicago-born Otis Farnsworth had seen Anglos queuing at Mexican-owned eateries, so he put enchiladas, tamales, rice and beans on one plate for them, and restaurants across Texas copied him.

Which people's cooking is Tex-Mex cuisine built on?

Tejanos are Texans of Mexican descent; the food is a subtype of Southwestern cuisine.

Which spice is used far more in Tex-Mex than in Mexican cooking?

Cumin runs all through Tex-Mex, from chili powder to enchilada gravy. The heavy hand with it is traced to Canary Islanders whom Spain sent to settle Texas.

Which tortilla type is characteristic of Tex-Mex rather than most Mexican cooking?

Flour tortillas took over Texas kitchens in the 1930s, when wheat flour became easy to buy: they are far quicker to make at home than corn ones. Mexico City never made the switch.

Where is the world's first frozen margarita machine, built for a Dallas restaurant in 1971, now kept?

The Smithsonian took it in 2005. Mariano Martinez had wanted a 7-Eleven Slurpee machine for his overworked bar; refused one, he rebuilt a secondhand soft-serve ice cream machine instead.

In which Mexican border town were nachos invented?

Piedras Negras faces Eagle Pass, Texas, across the Rio Grande, and it was visitors from the Texas side who first ate the dish. The city has since put up a bronze plaque to its inventor and declared an annual Day of the Nacho.

Nacho, the nickname behind nachos, is short for which Spanish name?

Ignacio Anaya, Nacho to everyone, named his improvised snack 'Nachos especiales' after himself. Dictionary-makers puzzled over the word until 1988, when a Mexican-born librarian told an Oxford researcher what the nickname meant.

Anaya first made nachos in the 1940s for which hungry customers?

Army wives from the American base across the river turned up when no cook could be found, so Anaya melted cheese and sliced pickled peppers over fried tortilla pieces himself. A church cookbook printed his recipe in 1954.

Traditional South Texas barbacoa is made from which part of the cow?

The head: barbacoa de cabeza grew out of ranch life, where Mexican cowhands were paid partly in the parts of the animal their bosses did not want, and made the most of them.

At which ballpark were 'ballpark nachos' with cheese sauce first sold in the 1970s?

Arlington Stadium's concession operators feared the new snack would eat into popcorn sales. It did the opposite: the peppers' heat sent fans back for drinks, and takings rose across the stand.

Which sportscaster's on-air enthusiasm for nachos in 1978 spread the dish nationwide?

Howard Cosell was handed a plate in the Monday Night Football booth, took a liking to the name and kept working 'nachos' into his commentary for weeks. A Texas stadium snack became a national one.

Which candy once came with dinner at nearly every Mexican restaurant in Texas?

Pecan pralines, or a dish of sherbet, rounded off the dinner at no extra charge. The custom is traced to the street vendors who sold pecan candy and tamales in Texas cities from the 1880s.

Which cut of beef is the classic fajita meat?

Skirt steak was a cheap trimming until fajitas took off. By 1984 its price had jumped so sharply that a Texas A&M researcher set out to trace the dish that caused it.

The Spanish word faja, root of fajita, means what?

Strip or belt: fajita is the diminutive, 'little strip', a ranch and butcher's word for a cut of beef long before it named a dish. The Spanish word goes back to the Latin fascia, a band.

Otilia Garza is credited with adding which signature touch to fajitas?

She got the idea from queso flameado served on cast iron in Acapulco, at her Round-Up Restaurant in Pharr.

Which Houston restaurant popularised the fajita from 1973?

Ninfa's opened in 1973 on Houston's Navigation Boulevard, where Ninfa Laurenzo, raised in the Rio Grande Valley, grilled the beef of her childhood and called it an old family recipe. A restaurant empire followed.

Which West Texas ghost town has hosted a famous chili cook-off since 1967?

Terlingua, an abandoned mining camp near the Rio Grande, staged the first as a duel: a New York humorist had sneered at Texans' chili, so a Texas newspaperman cooked against him there. It ended in a tie.

Before the word 'fajitas' caught on, Houston diners in the 1970s ordered the dish as what?

Tacos al carbon, 'charcoal tacos', was the menu name when a Houston restaurant made the grilled beef famous from 1973. The ranch word fajita took over only as the craze spread in the 1980s.

Which northern Mexican state gives its name to the white melting cheese of traditional queso?

Chihuahua cheese, mild and white, melts into the northern Mexican dish that Texas queso echoes. Texans mostly switched to processed cheese, which stays smooth where natural cheese tends to clump.

Which processed cheese is the classic base of Tex-Mex queso?

Velveeta is engineered to melt smooth, which is why Texans stir it with a can of Ro-Tel tomatoes and green chiles for the standard home queso. Kraft has long advertised it for exactly that.

What is a chimichanga?

A deep-fried burrito, and Arizona restaurants still argue over who fried the first. One story is a kitchen accident, another a 1946 experiment in using up burritos that had not sold.

In which Arizona city is the chimichanga's US birthplace usually placed?

Tucson has advertised itself as the 'home of the chimichanga', and its oldest Mexican restaurant, El Charro, tells the best-known origin story. A Phoenix rival dates its own claim to 1946.

The El Charro legend says Monica Flin shouted 'chimichanga' instead of what?

A Spanish profanity was halfway out, the family story goes, when Flin remembered the young nieces in her kitchen and swerved to 'chimichanga', a nonsense word along the lines of 'thingamajig'.

Frito pie is traditionally served in what?

The chip bag is split open and the chili, cheese and onion are piled straight onto the corn chips, so the snack needs no plate. Texas and New Mexico both claim to have thought of it first.

Which Santa Fe lunch counter is sometimes credited with the 'true' 1960s Frito pie?

Woolworth's on the Santa Fe plaza is where Teresa Hernandez said she ladled red chili over Fritos in the 1960s. Texans counter that the mother of the man who launched Fritos was cooking with them decades earlier.

What do Midwesterners call their taco-meat version of the Frito pie?

Walking taco is the Midwest's name for the hand-held meal of fairs, tailgates and school cafeterias. Purists there draw a line: taco-seasoned beef makes it a walking taco, chili makes it a Frito pie.

Which snack was first made from leftover tortillas at Disneyland's Casa de Fritos restaurant?

Doritos began as a way to use up tortillas the kitchen was throwing out: in the early 1960s they were cut up, fried and seasoned, guests loved them, and a Frito-Lay executive took the idea national.

Chili is the official state dish of Texas; which pepper is the official state pepper?

Jalapeño won the title in a resolution that called it a 'delicious and indispensable staple of Texas cuisine'. Lawmakers later added a second, the tiny wild chiltepin, as the state's official native pepper.

The 'chili queens' who sold chili from casual stands were famous in which city?

San Antonio's chili queens set up open-air tables in the city's plazas from the 1880s. Locals and tourists crowded in, and the queens' fame helped give the city its reputation as the capital of Tex-Mex.

At which 1893 fair did a Texas chili stand give many Americans their first taste?

The Columbian Exposition was Chicago's world's fair, and the chili stand there carried the dish's fame far beyond Texas. Around the same time a ready-mixed chili powder went on sale, so cooks anywhere could make it.

Willie Gebhardt, who bottled Eagle Brand chili powder in 1890s Texas, was born in which country?

Germany: his family settled in a German-founded Texas town when he was a boy. Fresh chiles were seasonal, so he dried and ground imported anchos into a powder that kept for months, and chili could be cooked all year.

Wick Fowler's chili, later sold as a spice kit, went by what name?

Two-Alarm was the name on the spice kit that newspaperman Wick Fowler began selling in 1964. Three years later he defended Texas's honour against a New York humorist in the state's first great chili cook-off.

Which spirit is the base of a margarita?

Tequila, shaken with orange liqueur and lime, makes a drink that now seems inseparable from Tex-Mex, yet in the Tex-Mex restaurants of the 1950s margaritas had not yet made the scene.

Margarita is Spanish for which flower?

Daisy is also the name of an old family of cocktails: spirit, liqueur and citrus. One theory holds that the margarita began as a new twist on the daisy, a drink newspapers mention by 1936, with its name put into Spanish.

Which singer was the Galveston bartender Santos Cruz said to have named the margarita for?

Peggy Lee's stage name does the work: Peggy is a pet form of Margaret, which in Spanish is Margarita. The Galveston tale is one of many rival claims to the drink, and the singer was in fact born Norma Egstrom.

Which magazine printed the first known margarita recipe, in December 1953?

Esquire made it Drink of the Month and introduced it like a film star: 'She's from Mexico, Señores, and she is lovely to look at, exciting and provocative.' The recipe asked for just one ounce of the spirit and a dash of triple sec.

Tia Sophia's diner in Santa Fe claims the first menu to name which dish, in 1975?

Breakfast burrito was only the menu wording. The owners' son says his father was 'merely the first person to call it' that: New Mexicans had long rolled bacon and potatoes into their morning tortillas at home.

Rebecca Webb Carranza popularised the triangular tortilla chip from a 1940s tortilla factory in which city?

Los Angeles: when her family's new tortilla machine kept turning out misshapen rejects, she took some home for a party, cut them into triangles and fried them. They were such a hit that she sold them at ten cents a bag.

Houston restaurateur Felix Tijerina, who courted Anglo diners with mild Tex-Mex, later led which civil rights group?

LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens, elected him president four times. He used the post to start the Little Schools of the 400, which taught Spanish-speaking preschoolers 400 English words before first grade.

Long before it meant food, 'Tex-Mex' was the nickname of what?

A railway: the line from Corpus Christi to the Mexican border at Laredo, chartered in 1875, carried the nickname painted on its boxcars. Nobody in print used it for food until the second half of the 20th century.

In Norway, taco night has become a weekly tradition on which day?

Friday: Norwegians call it 'fredagstaco', and supermarkets build their promotions around it. The dish arrived with American oil workers in the 1960s and spread across the country in the 1990s.

Whose 1972 book The Cuisines of Mexico separated Mexican from Americanized Mexican food?

Diana Kennedy, an English-born writer living in Mexico, called the food served north of the border 'so-called Mexican'. Texas restaurateurs took it as an insult, yet her line made Tex-Mex a cuisine in its own right.

Chef Adán Medrano calls the food he champions 'comida casera', Spanish for what?

Home cooking is his whole case: the dishes South Texas families made for themselves are, he argues, native to the region and older than the border, and Tex-Mex is what restaurants later made of them.

Which 1986 film made Tex-Mex explode in Paris, according to restaurateur Claude Benayoun?

Betty Blue, a French cult romance nominated for the foreign-language Oscar, has its hero cooking chili con carne. Benayoun's Paris restaurant had been half empty for two years; after the film, he said, things went completely crazy.

Which two brands spread Tex-Mex through the Nordic countries in the early 1990s?

Old El Paso and Santa Maria turned a foreign novelty into a Nordic staple: tacos, all but unknown in Norway a generation earlier, were by the 2010s one of the country's most popular dinners.

American oil workers brought a taste for tacos to which Norwegian city in the 1960s?

Stavanger grocer Allert Middelthon began stocking taco goods around 1965 for the American families the North Sea oil hunt had brought to town. The rest of Norway caught on only decades later.

The first Chili's opened in Dallas in 1975 inside a converted what?

Post office: a former postal station on Greenville Avenue became Larry Lavine's informal burger restaurant. Eight years and more than twenty branches later he sold the chain to Norman Brinker, who took it worldwide.

In which California city did Glen Bell open the first Taco Bell in 1962?

Downey nearly lost the building for good: the 400-square-foot stand, nicknamed Numero Uno, faced demolition until Taco Bell lifted it onto a truck in 2015 and drove it through the night to its headquarters.

Which fried pastry, served with honey, did Texas name an official state pastry in 2003?

Sopaipilla had to share the title with strudel, and not for long: the 2003 resolution lapsed in January 2005. The pastry is tortilla dough rolled, folded and fried in hot fat.