Burrito

• 1. Introduction

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  The burrito, a flour tortilla wrapped around a filling, once alarmed a Scottish noblewoman on the road in Michoacán. Frances Erskine Inglis described the moment in her book Life in Mexico, published in 1843. She was hungry, and a local woman asked whether she would like "to eat a burro in the mean time." A burro is a donkey, so Inglis was startled and said she would rather wait a little longer.

  A second woman then added that some people call these things pecadoras, which means female sinners. What arrived turned out to be hot tortillas with cheese inside. Inglis found them particularly good.

  That small misunderstanding holds the puzzle of this documentary. Why would a food carry the name of a donkey? Why does Mexico City call the same thing a taco? And how did a regional nickname from northern Mexico end up on San Francisco steam tables, San Diego corner shops and Los Angeles food trucks?

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• 2. A Taco by Another Name

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  In Guanajuato, Guerrero, Michoacán, San Luis Potosí, Sonora and Sinaloa, a tortilla rolled around a filling was once simply called a burrito. Mexico City and the areas around it called the same thing a taco. In Yucatán and Quintana Roo the word was codzito. The capital's cultural pull settled the matter, and taco became the default. The older local words faded, and people began inventing new meanings and folk histories to explain them.

  The word itself means "little donkey" in Spanish. It is the diminutive of burro. The Sonoran historian and politician Horacio Sobarzo Díaz offered the sharpest explanation. In his telling, some dubious taco stands in Sonora sold donkey meat in place of beef. Customers, maliciously, began calling tacos burritos to hint at what was inside.

  Sobarzo Díaz noted that dried beef is much loved in Sonora. He observed that on some occasions dried donkey meat had been sold fraudulently. He presumed that where fried foods were served, a bait and switch took place, and the taco picked up its nickname.

  Two gentler theories exist. One says the name reflects how much a burrito can carry, the way a donkey carries a heavy burden. The other says a rolled tortilla resembles the pack a donkey typically bears, which would make the name an example of synecdoche. Of the three explanations, only the donkey meat story comes with a named source, the 1966 Vocabulario Sonorense.

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• 3. The Paper Trail

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  Maya cooks were wrapping food in corn tortillas as early as 1500 BC. Their fillings included chili peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, squash and avocados. The Pueblo peoples of the Southwestern United States likewise made tortillas filled with beans and meat sauce, prepared much like a modern burrito. Both traditions could just as easily be called the ancestors of the simpler taco. The precise origin of the modern burrito is not currently known.

  The clearest evidence comes from Mexican dictionaries. The Diccionario de Mejicanismos of 1895, by Feliz Ramos i Duarte, defines burrito as a rolled-up tortilla with meat or something else inside. It names Guanajuato as the place that used the word. The same entry says Yucatán called the dish a coçito, while Cuernavaca and Mexico City called it a taco.

  Later works point to other states. The Diccionario Agrícola Nacional of 1935 and Francisco J. Santamaría's Diccionario de Mejicanismos of 1959 both list the word for Guerrero. The Colegio de México's Diccionario del Español de México adds Michoacán. For Sinaloa, these sources describe something narrower, a "taco de sal": a rolled corn tortilla with salt inside.

  Because burrito began as a regional label for a taco, corn and wheat tortillas were both acceptable. In California, Ana Bégué de Packman wrote in Early California Hospitality in 1938 that either kind could be used interchangeably. That was the same decade in which burritos first reached American restaurant menus.

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• 4. Folk Tales and First Menus

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  A man named Juan Méndez features in the most repeated folk story about the burrito's origin. He supposedly sold tacos from a street stand in the Bella Vista neighborhood of Ciudad Juárez during the Mexican Revolution period of 1910-1921. He used a donkey to carry himself and his food. To keep the food warm, he wrapped it in large homemade flour tortillas under a small tablecloth. The story says people came to know it as the food of the little donkey, and the name stuck to these large tacos.

  Most such stories originate in the United States and grow from the idea that burritos differ from tacos. Another guess ties the dish to the vaqueros, the cowboys of northern Mexico in the 19th century. Neither account is documented in the dictionaries.

  The documented American trail begins in Los Angeles. In 1923, Alejandro Borquez opened the Sonora Cafe, which later became the El Cholo Spanish Cafe. Burritos first appeared on American restaurant menus at El Cholo during the 1930s.

  The U.S. media mentioned burritos for the first time in 1934. They appeared in the Mexican Cookbook, a collection of regional New Mexico recipes by the historian Erna Fergusson. In 1956, Duane Roberts developed a frozen burrito in Southern California, which turned the dish into something a grocery freezer could hold.

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• 5. Juárez and the North

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  Ciudad Juárez sits across the border from El Paso, Texas, in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. Burritos are a traditional food there, sold in restaurants and at roadside stands. Border towns such as Villa Ahumada have an established reputation for serving them.

  Authentic Mexican burritos are usually small and thin. A flour tortilla typically holds only one or two ingredients. The options include meat or fish, potato, rice, beans, asadero cheese, chile rajas or chile relleno. Cooks may also use barbacoa, mole, or refried beans with cheese, which makes a bean and cheese burrito. Another choice is deshebrada, shredded slow-cooked flank steak. It comes in a chile version, mild to moderately hot, and a very hot salsa verde version. The Mexican burrito may be a northern variation of the traditional taco de canasta, eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

  Outside Mexico, burritos rank among the most popular examples of Mexican cuisine. Within Mexico, they are popular mainly in the north, although they are starting to turn up in some nontraditional venues elsewhere. Wheat flour tortillas, once particular to northwestern Mexico, the Mexican-American community of the Southwestern US and Pueblo Indian tribes, are now common across much of the country. Possibly this is because those regions are less than ideal for growing maize.

  In Central and Southern Mexico, people call burritos tacos de harina, meaning wheat flour tacos. Northern-style restaurants outside northern Mexico sometimes use the feminine form, burritas. Sonora and its surroundings add a long, thin fried burrito called a chivichanga, which resembles a chimichanga. Sonora also has a variation known as the burro percherón.

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• 6. The Mission Burrito

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  Steam tables in the taquerías of San Francisco's Mission District gave the burrito a new shape in the 1960s and 1970s. Cooks worked an assembly line, stuffing a large flour tortilla and wrapping it in aluminum foil. Fillings might include carne asada, Mexican-style rice, whole beans rather than refritos, sour cream and onion.

  Febronio Ontiveros claims to have offered the first retail burrito in San Francisco in 1961. The place was El Faro, which means The Lighthouse, a corner grocery store on Folsom Street. He also claims credit for the "super burrito," which adds rice, sour cream and guacamole to the standard meat, beans and cheese. That style may have fed into the early development of the San Francisco style.

  The Mission burrito became a regional culinary movement during the 1970s and 1980s. It grew locally at Mission Street taquerias such as El Farolito. Nationally, it spread through chains including Chipotle Mexican Grill, Illegal Pete's, Chevy's Fresh Mex, Freebirds World Burrito, Qdoba and Barberitos. Chili's had a brief stint with Fresh Mex foods and burritos between 2015 and 2017.

  The idea reached beyond the burrito itself in 1995. World Wrapps opened that year in San Francisco's Marina District and brought a burrito-inspired wrap style to the restaurant industry.

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• 7. San Diego and Los Angeles

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  Roberto Robledo opened a tortilleria in San Diego in the early 1960s and learned the restaurant business there. In the late 1960s he began selling small bean burritos, which he called burrititos, at La Lomita. By 1970 he had opened the first Roberto's Taco Shop. By 1999 the brand had grown to a chain of 60 taco shops. New San Diego shops borrowed its prestige by adopting the "-bertos" suffix, with names like Alberto's, Filiberto's and Hilberto's.

  Food writers describe the San Diego style as an austere meal of meat, cheese and salsa. It contrasts with the larger Mission burrito, which always holds more ingredients. Many San Diego restaurants call their burritos no-frills and skip the assembly line. Carolynn Carreno has said that carne asada burritos are as integral to San Diego as a slice of pizza pie is to a New Yorker.

  The California burrito arrived in the 1980s. According to Gustavo Arellano, it started at an unknown restaurant with a -berto's name. Lolita's, possibly its Bonita location, has been documented as the place where it was first made. The Fresh MXN chain, formerly Santana's, also claims it. The earliest known published mention is a 1995 article in the Albuquerque Tribune.

  The California burrito typically holds chunks of carne asada, French fries, cheese, and some combination of cilantro, pico de gallo, sour cream, onion or guacamole. The ingredients echo the carne asada fries dish. Writers call it fusion border food and a trans-class food, eaten across socioeconomic lines. Cooks may add shrimp or swap in carnitas or chicken.

  Los Angeles has its own traditional version, found at long-running Mexican-American restaurants such as Al & Bea's, Lupe's #2 and Burrito King. It is usually built from refried beans, stewed beef or chili, and cheddar cheese, with rice rarely included. The most basic form is beans and cheese. Green chile and red chile versions add chiles or a vegetarian chile sauce. Restaurants that also sell hamburgers and sandwiches may offer a burrito version, such as a hot dog burrito.

  Three fusion styles also belong to Los Angeles. A kosher burrito has been served since 1946 at its namesake restaurant at 1st Street and Main in Downtown Los Angeles. The Korean kogi burrito, invented by the American chef Roy Choi, uses chile-soy vinaigrette, sesame oil and fresh lime juice. LA Weekly ranked it the seventh best burrito in Los Angeles in 2012, and food writer Cathy Chaplin said "this is what Los Angeles tastes like." Finally, the Jogasaki food truck is best known for a sushi burrito, a flour tortilla filled with spicy tuna, tempura and cucumber.

  The city's large Mexican community also makes regional burritos available, from Oaxaca to Hidalgo.

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• 8. Cousins and the Griddle

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  A typical burrito holds beef, chicken or pork, often with rice, whole or refried beans, lettuce, tomatoes and cheese. Cooks add salsa, pico de gallo, guacamole or crema. The tortilla is sometimes lightly grilled or steamed so that it softens and sticks to itself, and the tight wrap lets people eat burritos by hand.

  A wet burrito sheds that hand-held ease. It is covered in a red chili sauce much like red enchilada sauce, with melted shredded cheese on top, and eaten with a knife and fork. It goes by smothered, enchilada-style, mojado, and suizo, which is Spanish for Swiss and signals a dish topped with cheese or cream. Enchiladas, by comparison, use corn masa tortillas and a savory sauce.

  A burrito bowl is not technically a burrito, because its ingredients are not wrapped. It arranges burrito fillings in a bowl, often over rice. In 2017, a Meal, Ready-to-Eat version was introduced. A taco salad is something else, built on lettuce and served in a fried tortilla shell called a tostada.

  Breakfast burritos wrap American breakfast foods, particularly scrambled eggs, in a flour tortilla. They were invented and popularized in several regional cuisines, most notably New Mexican, Southwestern, Californian and Tex-Mex. A chimichanga is a deep-fried burrito popular in Southwestern and Tex-Mex cooking and in Sinaloa and Sonora. Far away, the Turkish dürüm is a wrap filled with typical doner kebab ingredients.

  Anne Albertine, a research chef at Taco Bell, experimented with grilling burritos to make them more portable. Grilling seals a large burrito so that its contents do not spill. Some San Francisco taquerias and northern Mexican burrito stands already used the technique, traditionally on a comal, or griddle. Bean burritos have also been touted for their health benefits. They are high in protein and low in saturated fat, and black bean versions supply dietary fiber and phytochemicals.

  A taco is similar but served open, usually smaller, and often made with corn tortillas. The taco editor of Texas Monthly argues that burritos are simply a type of taco, which is where the Mexican dictionaries left the matter more than a century ago.

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