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The recipe is a mainstay under the Friday night lights and has morphed – and gotten more portable – since its debut in 1949.
The full transcript of this episode of Stories from Texas is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.
WF Strong [00:00:00] Fritos Pie or Fritos Chili Pie, or simply Frito pie has some referred 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 today. You’ll also find it with the added ingredient of a mound of jalapenos on top. The first version ever served, believe it or not, was at the Dallas Dietetic Association conference in 1949. The recipe came from Fritos itself. The original recipe called for putting a layer of Fritos in a casserole dish, covering with chili, and then covering it all with liberal amounts of cheese and onions. Bake it 350 for 20 minutes. You can see how this got MacGyver into just pouring chili into a bag of Fritos for efficiency and transport ability, 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 45 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. They are a Texas original, though Charles Doolin of San Antonio created them. He put his own spin on a fried chips recipe he bought from a Mexican restaurant. There, he cut out the masa and cook 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 60 made something she called cream tacos, which was a cheesy chili concurrently 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 of their slogan neighbor. How long has it been since you had a big steaming bowl of Wolf brown 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 standalone snack. They were sold as an ingredient one would purchase to add to casseroles like sweet potato casserole, for instance. The inventor’s wife even experimented with pouring chocolate over Fritos and baking them on a cookie sheet. She’s also credited with coming up with the original chili pie recipe mentioned earlier. This fact comes to us from her daughter, Carlita Doolin, who wrote the most thorough history on the subject. You can find. It is called Fritos Pie Stories, recipes, and more. This 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 the world of super spicy snack foods. Along with her mother, Carlita gives credit to another woman for popularizing the dish. She writes with admiration that Teresa Hernandez sold thousands of Frito chili pies at the Woolworth’s counter in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the 1960s. 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 sales? I’m WF Strong. These are stories from Texas. Some of them are true.
This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.
