Frito Pie
from A Taste of Memories: Comforting Foods from Our Past By Gloria Hander Lyons

Fritos Corn Chips were introduced in the late 1930s in Texas and were widespread by the 1940s. One popular dish created by an inventive American was Frito Pie.

New Mexicans say Teresa Hernandez invented it in the 1960s at the Santa Fe Woolworth’s (now the Five & Dime), ladling her mother’s homemade red chili into opened corn chip bags, adding no garnishes or additions. Texans, meanwhile, claim that the dish, complete with onions and cheese, was invented in San Antonio by Daisy Dean Doolin, the mother of Fritos inventor Charles Elmer Doolin, in the 1930s.

Actually, both origin stories are myths according to the 2011 book Fritos Pie, Stories, Recipes and More, by Kaleta Doolin, Charles’s daughter. Among the more startling claims she makes is that her father, who’s often called the Thomas Edison of snack foods, didn’t really invent Fritos. Rather, he bought the recipe and a small corn chip company from a Mexican named Gustavo Olguin who was trying to raise money to return home. (Oddly, nobody ever calls Olguin the Simón Bolivar of botanas.)

Drawing on unprecedented access to Frito-Lay company records, the book dismisses the Santa Fe Woolworth’s claim outright. Documents confirm that the company’s publicity department served “Fritos chili pie,” as the corporation called it, to the Dallas Dietetic Association in 1949, more than a decade before Hernandez concocted her own dish.

The author credits her grandmother Daisy Dean with the company’s landmark 1937 “Cooking with Fritos” campaign, which first championed the corn chip’s culinary versatility and included a recipe for Fritos fruitcake. But the pie itself was not her doing, according to a ’60s newspaper article quoted in Fritos Pie: “While recipes are created for Frito-Lay’s entire line of snack products and canned foods,” the story reads, “perhaps the most famous recipe developed by the Consumer Service department is that for Fritos Chili Pie.”

So it seems that the Frito pie as we know it is actually the creation of a corporate test kitchen and not any one individual, one dish among many in a ’50s Frito-Lay recipe booklet that included Frito-kets (salmon croquettes made with Fritos) and Fritos meatloaf. The breakout moment for Frito pie came in 1962, when the recipe appeared on millions of bags of chips: “Heat can of chili, pour into bag of Fritos, and sprinkle with grated cheese, and chopped onions.” That formula has been followed by high school football stadium concession stands ever since, as well as Texas school lunch programs, not to mention Frito pie aficionados, although most of us make our own chili.

3 cups Frito Brand Corn Chips
3/4 cup chopped onion
1 cup grated Cheddar cheese
2 1/2 cups chili con carne

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Spread 2 cups of Fritos in a baking dish. Sprinkle half of the onion and half the cheese over the Fritos. Pour the chili over the onion and cheese. Sprinkle the remaining Fritos, onion and cheese over the chili. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes until cheese is bubbly.

Makes 4 to 6 servings.