Fritos pie – or Fritos chili pie, or simply Frito pie, as some refer to it – is a much-loved delight often spooned up under Friday night lights here in Texas and beyond. Frito pie season is upon us again.
The first version ever served, believe it or not, was at the Dallas Dietetic Association conference in 1949. The original recipe, which came from Fritos itself, called for putting a layer of Fritos in a casserole dish, covering it with chili, and then covering all that with liberal amounts of cheese and onions. Bake at 350 for 20 minutes.
You can see how this got MacGyvered into just pouring chili into a bag of Fritos for efficiency and transportability. Today, you’ll also find it with the added ingredient of a mound of jalapeños on top.
But no staple of the Texas diet of this magnitude could have Fritos’ origin claims go uncontested. I’ve heard many baby boomers claim that their mother invented Frito chili pie out of necessity to feed incessantly hungry kids back in 1945 or 42. I’ve heard claims that their grandmothers had been making something like Frito pie since the 20s, which would have been a neat trick since Fritos weren’t invented until 1932.
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They are a Texas original, though. Charles Doolin of San Antonio created them, putting his own spin on a fried chips recipe he bought from a Mexican restaurant there: He cut out the masa and cooked them in strips. It’s interesting that most Texans now associate the chip with piles of meat, as Doolin was a vegetarian.
Doolin called them “fritos” after the Spanish word for fried. (He also invented Cheetos, by the way, which have morphed into Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, the breakfast of teenage champions these days.)
My mother in the 60s made something she called “creamed tacos,” which was a cheesy chili con carne poured over a plate of Fritos instead of tortilla chips. Exceptionally filling, and no doubt came from Frito-Lay itself.
Though Fritos had their own brand of chili by then, my mother, like Hank Hill, preferred Wolf Brand Chili, another Texas original. Still love their slogan: “Neighbor, how long has it been since you had a big steaming bowl of Wolf Brand Chili? Well, neighbor, that’s too long.”
This type of mixing and matching was encouraged in the early days of Fritos, as they were not marketed as a stand-alone snack. They were sold as an ingredient one would purchase to add to casseroles, like a sweet potato casserole, for instance.
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The inventor’s wife – who even experimented with pouring chocolate over Fritos and baking them on a cookie sheet – is also credited with coming up with the original chili pie recipe, according to her daughter, Kaleta Doolin, who wrote the most thorough history on the subject you can find. “Fritos® Pie: Stories, Recipes, and More” is an incredibly detailed history that provides all the nature of recipes for Fritos you have never imagined. Maybe there is another classic waiting to be popularized in this world of super spicy snack foods?
Along with her mother, Kaleta gives credit to another woman for popularizing the dish. She writes with admiration that Teresa Hernandez sold thousands of Fritos chili pies at the Woolworths counter in Santa Fe, N.M., in the 1960’s. She reportedly sold 56,000 bags in one year there.
And at the same time it was all the rage in San Antonio and across Texas at football games as fundraisers for civic and student groups. Who knows how many kids were sent to college on the profits from Fritos pie?
