Did you know that nachos were invented in Mexico by a Mexican, but they’re not exactly traditional Mexican food? They’ve become super popular and are now served in restaurants all over the world. What’s interesting is that the person who created them wasn’t even a chef!
Let’s travel back to the 1940s. Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya was working at Club Victoria in Piedras Negras, a town on the border of Mexico and Texas. One day, a group of hungry visitors from Eagle Pass, Texas, came in looking for something to eat. The cook was nowhere to be found, so Nacho decided to make a quick dish using what he had in the kitchen. He put together tortilla chips, grated cheese, and sliced jalapeños, and it was a hit! He named the dish “Nachos Especiales,” and the name stuck.
To understand nachos better, we need to go way back to when corn, or maize, was first grown by indigenous people in central Mexico around 7000 BCE. Corn was a big part of the Aztec and Maya diets. However, the corn back then wasn’t like the sweet corn we eat today. It was tough and hard to eat.
To make corn easier to eat, people in Mesoamerica developed a process called nixtamalization around 1500 BCE. This process involved soaking corn in a mixture of water and an alkali like ash or lime. This made the corn easier to chew and more nutritious. It also helped prevent a disease called pellagra, which happened when people didn’t get enough niacin, a type of vitamin B3.
With nixtamalization, corn could be turned into masa, a dough used to make tortillas, tamales, and other dishes. For a long time, people in Mexico have been making tortillas and frying them to create dishes like chilaquiles, which are similar to nachos. When tortillas are fried, they become tostadas, which are like big tortilla chips topped with various ingredients.
The idea of frying tortillas likely goes back centuries. By the 1900s, tortilla making became commercialized, and factories started frying leftover tortillas into chips to avoid waste. These chips eventually became popular snacks.
In the late 1940s, Rebecca Webb Carranza, who ran a tortilla factory in Los Angeles, noticed that people loved the fried tortilla scraps she served at a party. She started selling them as “torch chips,” and they became a hit. Although she wasn’t the first to make tortilla chips, she helped popularize them on a large scale.
In 1966, Frito-Lay introduced Doritos, which means “little golden things” in Spanish. They started with a toasted corn flavor and later added nacho cheese, which became very popular.
Cheese is a key ingredient in nachos. The original nachos used American cheese, but today, Monterey Jack is a popular choice because it melts well and has a mild flavor. The gooey nacho cheese sauce we know today was developed in the 1970s by Frank Liberto, who wanted a quick and easy way to serve nachos at sports events. He used science to create a cheese that stayed melted and delicious.
Nachos have come a long way since Ignacio’s original recipe. Now, you can find nachos topped with all sorts of ingredients like guacamole, ground beef, salsa, and sour cream. People even make creative versions like dessert nachos or nachos with fancy toppings.
Nachos are a great example of how different cultures and ideas can come together to create something amazing. They’re a delicious fusion of traditional ingredients and modern creativity, enjoyed by people all over the world.
Gather your favorite ingredients and create your own version of nachos. Use tortilla chips, cheese, and any toppings you like. Share your creation with the class and explain why you chose those ingredients. This activity will help you understand the versatility and creativity involved in making nachos.
Create a timeline that traces the history of nachos from their invention in the 1940s to their global popularity today. Include key events such as the introduction of tortilla chips and the development of nacho cheese sauce. This will help you visualize how nachos evolved over time.
Conduct a simple experiment to understand nixtamalization. Soak corn kernels in a limewater solution and observe the changes. Discuss how this process made corn more nutritious and its importance in the history of Mesoamerican diets. This will give you insight into the science behind traditional food preparation.
Research and present how nachos are served in different countries. Find out what unique toppings or variations are popular in other cultures. Share your findings with the class to appreciate the global influence of nachos and how they adapt to local tastes.
Organize a nacho tasting session where you try different types of nachos, including traditional and modern versions. Rate them based on taste, creativity, and presentation. This will help you explore the diversity of nacho recipes and understand what makes them appealing.
Here’s a sanitized version of the YouTube transcript:
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Nachos were invented in Mexico by a Mexican, but they’re not exactly traditional Mexican food. They have become enormously successful and are available in restaurants all around the world. Interestingly, the creator wasn’t even a chef. Let’s go back to the 1940s. Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya was working at Club Victoria in the border town of Piedras Negras, Mexico. A group from the neighboring Texas town of Eagle Pass came in looking for something to eat. According to his son’s version of the story, it was a group of wives from a nearby army base. However, Nacho himself was less specific.
As the restaurant’s maitre d’, Nacho’s job usually involved attending to guests, but on this particular occasion, the cook was nowhere to be found. Instead of turning the customers away, Nacho ducked into the kitchen to whip up a quick dish using the few ingredients he could find. The resulting plate of tortilla chips with grated cheese and sliced jalapeños was a hit. It needed a name, and “Nachos Especiales,” in homage to his creator, stuck—at least the first half of it did.
Hi, I’m Justin Dodd, and welcome to Food History. The story of nachos doesn’t start and end with the resourceful restaurant employee assembling a few basic components. The history of nachos can tell us a lot more than their simple ingredient list might suggest. Before we get into that, I want to say a huge thank you for the response to our mashed potatoes video last month. We received a ton of great ideas for future episodes of the show. A special shout-out to Couchmoose and Baboom66, who sent us down a wild rabbit hole that led us to nachos. If you have a particular question about food or drink history, leave it in the comments below. We’ll pick one question to research and answer in our next episode.
Now, let’s jump back thousands of years before “Nacho” was even a nickname, let alone an appetizer. Corn, or maize, was first domesticated by the indigenous people living in what is now central Mexico around 7000 BCE. Maize became a vital part of the Aztec and Maya diets, but the first maize crops didn’t produce the sweet golden kernels that we see in supermarkets today. Early corn grew on tiny cobs and was trapped in tough casings that made it hard to eat.
To make maize more palatable, Mesoamericans developed a process called nixtamalization around 1500 BCE. This process involves drying corn kernels and soaking them in warm water mixed with an alkali like ash or slaked lime. The high pH solution partially breaks down the tough cell walls of the corn, making it easier to chew and digest. Nixtamalization also makes corn more nutritious. Corn is high in niacin (vitamin B3), but it’s bound to other chemicals in its raw form. When the bound form of niacin passes through the digestive tract, the small intestine can’t absorb it, leading to malnutrition and a disease called pellagra, characterized by symptoms like sores on the skin, diarrhea, and delusions.
Following the development of nixtamalization, cases of niacin deficiency dropped, and the first major civilizations began to emerge. Fun fact: a 1997 article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine suggested that pellagra could have contributed to the rise of certain mythological beliefs. As corn became a major part of European diets, many peasants consumed unnixtamalized corn, leading to widespread niacin deficiencies and cases of pellagra. The article’s author suggested that symptoms of the disease, such as sensitivity to light, could be tied to the rise of vampire legends.
Now, you may be wondering what soaked corn and lime have to do with nachos. Well, nixtamalization allows corn to be made into masa, which is the basis for tacos, tamales, and many other dishes, including Tex-Mex favorites like nachos. People in Mexico have been flattening balls of masa and cooking them to make tortillas for thousands of years. For many of those years, cooks would fry up extra hunks of tortillas to make chilaquiles, which are fried tortilla pieces covered in salsa and served with toppings like cotija cheese and meat—one of the closer analogues to nachos you’ll find in Mexico.
When whole corn tortillas are fried in fat, they’re called tostadas, which translates to “toasted” in Spanish. Tostadas are often topped with various ingredients, from seafood to beans, but at their core, they’re basically giant tortilla chips. The history of fried tortillas likely goes back quite a while. According to a doctoral thesis by Vanessa Fonseca, there are accounts from the 16th century of “pedasus fritos de tortilla,” or fried tortilla strips, though those may have been dried and toasted rather than fried in oil.
In any case, the modern bite-sized version of fried tortillas didn’t really emerge as a distinct category until the 1900s when tortilla making was commercialized. Factory owners were looking for ways to repurpose excess tortillas that would otherwise go to waste. These scraps were often fried, cut into chips, and distributed to local restaurants.
So how did tortilla chips go from a factory afterthought to a snack aisle staple? Credit is often given to Rebecca Webb Carranza in the late 1940s. Carranza was president of El Zarape Tortilla Factory in Los Angeles. She fried tortilla scraps into chips, and after serving them at a family party, she noticed that people couldn’t get enough of them. “Torch chips,” as she called them, were initially sold for 10 cents a bag from the factory delicatessen.
Carranza wasn’t the first person to make tortilla chips for the public. In the 1930s, a California grocer was advertising Mexican tortilla chips in cellophane packages. In the 1910s, a company owned by Bartolo Martinez was selling tortilla chips in San Antonio. Martinez’s company had previously patented the so-called “melina process,” which produced a long-lasting dehydrated form of masa that could be easily packed and distributed. This innovation had a lasting impact, and the company claimed to have created the first commercial corn chips.
While Carranza didn’t invent the tortilla chip, she did kick off the trend of manufacturing them on a massive scale. Frito-Lay took her vision even further. In 1966, the snack company introduced Doritos—Spanish for “little golden things”—to the national market. They originally came in one flavor: toasted corn. It would take another six years for Doritos to roll out nacho cheese, the brand’s most popular flavor.
No matter what toppings are on your nachos, you’ll almost always find cheese in some form. Ignacio’s original nachos were topped with some type of American cheese, possibly Longhorn. Even today, you rarely see traditional Mexican cheeses like cotija or queso Oaxaca served on nachos. A more common choice is Monterey Jack, which originated in the Franciscan monasteries of Monterey, California, in the 1700s. This semi-firm cow’s milk cheese melts easily, providing that gooey texture that’s so important to nachos, and its milder flavor doesn’t clash with the bold flavors found in many Tex-Mex dishes.
However, when you hear “nacho cheese,” you probably think of the semi-liquid version that comes in a particular shade of yellow. This version of nacho cheese didn’t emerge until 30 years after Ignacio’s original creation. By that time, nachos had become a popular offering in bars and restaurants across much of the United States. Carmen Rocha, who waited tables at El Cholo Mexican Restaurant in Los Angeles from 1959 to the 1990s, is commonly credited with popularizing nachos in the West. She was introduced to them in Texas and served them as an off-menu item to customers in LA. The dish became so popular that it quickly earned a permanent spot on the El Cholo menu and spread to other eateries throughout the region.
Frank Liberto saw the potential of nachos beyond bar food. He was the owner of the concessions company Rico’s Products in the 1970s and believed nachos would be successful at sporting events. He planned to bring them to the stadium where the Texas Rangers played in Arlington. There was one problem: baseball fans weren’t going to wait several minutes for cheese to melt on their chips. Liberto knew he needed to create a version of nachos that could be assembled quickly, so he developed nacho cheese—a shelf-stable product that maintained its gooey consistency and was ready to be poured over tortilla chips the moment customers placed their order.
How did they achieve this? It was science. Many brands of nacho cheese use a compound called sodium citrate, which lowers the acidity in cheese and allows the proteins to become more soluble. This means that the emulsified liquid and fat are less likely to separate when melted. When you add sodium citrate to cheese, it melts more easily and stays melted without getting oily or clumpy.
Ready-made nachos were well-received when they debuted at a Texas Rangers game in 1976, but they really took off in 1978. By then, nachos had made it to Texas Stadium in Irving, and when announcer Howard Cosell was served a plate of them in the broadcast booth, they became the surprise star of a Cowboys game. He repeatedly referenced them throughout the night, even using the word “nacho” to describe plays he liked. By the time the fourth quarter ended, nachos had solidified their place in American culture.
Today, nachos have evolved far beyond Ignacio’s original recipe. While some may prefer their chips with cheese and sliced jalapeños, it’s not uncommon to find nachos topped with guacamole, ground beef, salsa, and sour cream. You can riff on the template endlessly, for better or worse. Online, you can find instructions for making poutine nachos, Thanksgiving leftover nachos, and even dessert nachos. At the Park Hyatt in New York, you can order Russian nachos for $110, topped with lobster remoulade and Osetra caviar.
Nachos are, in a way, a culinary microcosm of America. They are the product of traditional ingredients and cross-cultural exchange, combining scientific achievement and commerce to create something that has spread throughout the world. They may be a little unconventional, but they’re also pretty awesome and may just be one of history’s most successful examples of fusion cuisine.
If you didn’t see our previous episode of Food History, check it out right here. Our next episode drops February 26, so subscribe here so you don’t miss it. Until then, just remember: bread plate goes on the left, drink on your right. Thanks for watching!
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This version removes any inappropriate or unnecessary comments while maintaining the informative content of the original transcript.
Nachos – A dish of tortilla chips topped with melted cheese and often other savory toppings. – In history class, we learned that nachos were invented in Mexico in the 1940s.
Mexico – A country in southern North America, known for its rich history and cultural heritage. – The ancient civilizations of the Aztec and Maya thrived in what is now Mexico.
Corn – A cereal plant that yields large grains, or kernels, set in rows on a cob; a staple food in many cultures. – Corn was a crucial crop for the Aztec and Maya civilizations, providing a primary food source.
Tortillas – Thin, round flatbreads made from corn or wheat, commonly used in Mexican cuisine. – The Maya people were known for making tortillas from corn, which they used in many traditional dishes.
Cheese – A dairy product made from curdled or cultured milk, often used as a topping or ingredient in various dishes. – Cheese was not originally part of traditional indigenous diets in Mexico but became popular after European contact.
Indigenous – Originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native. – The indigenous peoples of the Americas, such as the Aztec and Maya, developed advanced societies long before European explorers arrived.
Nixtamalization – A process of preparing corn, in which the grain is soaked and cooked in an alkaline solution, usually limewater, and hulled. – Nixtamalization was an important process for the Aztec and Maya, as it made corn more nutritious and easier to grind into masa for tortillas.
Aztec – A Mesoamerican culture that flourished in central Mexico in the post-classic period before the Spanish conquest. – The Aztec empire was known for its impressive architecture, including the capital city of Tenochtitlán.
Maya – An ancient civilization known for its hieroglyphic script, art, architecture, mathematics, calendar, and astronomical system. – The Maya civilization built impressive cities like Tikal and Chichen Itza, which are still studied by historians today.
History – The study of past events, particularly in human affairs. – In history class, we explored the rise and fall of ancient civilizations like the Aztec and Maya.
