Nachos Period AOrigin theory BVerified

Nachos are a snack from northern Mexico: fried tortilla chips topped with melting cheese, scattered with jalapeño, and quickly heated. The dish took shape in the early 1940s, in a town right on the border between the United States and Mexico.

The corn and the chili peppers at its heart are old crops deeply rooted in the New World, on local tables from early on. Nachos still reach back no further than the twentieth century, because it was in a restaurant in that border town that fried tortilla chips with melting cheese, brought quickly to the guest, took shape as a single dish and got their name. Caught without a cook when guests came in, Ignacio Anaya grated Wisconsin cheese over a plate of fried tortillas, laid jalapeño across the top, and slid it under the salamander to serve at once.

The setting where it was served tells of its origins. It was born in a restaurant along the US–Mexico border, as a snack for guests coming from the United States. The border as a place, and the traffic of people moving across it, lie behind the making of this dish.

The origin of nachos fits neatly into a single anecdote. Around 1943, in the border town of Piedras Negras in Coahuila, Mexico, a party of women guests connected to the US military stationed at nearby Fort Duncan came in. The maître d'hôtel, Ignacio Anaya García, with no cook on hand, threw a plate together on the spot from whatever was in the kitchen. It came to be called nachos after Nacho, the inventor's nickname.

This anecdote is not merely hearsay. The food anthropologist Mario Montaño interviewed Anaya himself, his son, and friends directly, leaving a chain of testimony that supports the inventor and the date of 1943.

Even so, it is not seamless in every detail. The restaurant long named in the telling is the Victory Club, but Robb Walsh's The Tex-Mex Cookbook (2004), citing a 1961 interview with Anaya himself, holds that the setting was El Moderno. The restaurant's name wavers in the record. Montaño, further, read nachos as a 'deconstructed quesadilla': the pairing of fried tortilla with cheese was itself a local snack already present in the border region, and Anaya was the one who named it, reassembled it as a single dish, and spread it to the world. Neither Anaya's contribution nor the 1943 date is denied, but the strong claim that 'no rival origin story exists at all' loosens here.

The name's first appearance in print is another matter from the origin itself. The earliest known printing of the word nachos in English is in A Taste of Texas (1949), but the recipe there ran not under Anaya's name but under that of another person, Julian Cross. Anaya's own recipe would not reach print until St. Anne's Cookbook of 1954. The word's first appearance and the dish's origin, traced out, walk separate paths.