What are nachos?

According to one dictionary, nachos (pronounced ‘NAH-chos’) are ‘spiced tortilla chips, whether or not covered with melted cheese’. In the 1990s, you might get a tiny bowl of tomato salsa with hot chips as standard, but nowadays there is a wider choice of options. The toppings vary from yellow cheese sauce and guacamole, to colourful dishes including minced meat, tomatoes, olives, onions, jalapeno peppers and sour cream.

Nachos can rightly be called a tex-mex dish. In Mexico people do indeed eat chips made from stale tortillas (called totopos), as a side dish with fried beans for example, or as a snack with a few jalapeno peppers and some Mexican cheese on the side (never on top). But the dish, as it is eaten outside Mexico, was created less than a hundred years ago in the border area between the USA and Mexico. 

The story goes that in the 1940s, after closing time in the evening, a group of Americans knocked on the door of a restaurant just across the border in Mexico. The restaurant owner, Ignacio (nicknamed Nacho), served his clients totopos with jalapenos and cheese out of pure necessity – the cook had already gone home. 

The customers enthusiastically brought the dish across the border, where it caught on and immediately received the tex-mex treatment: for reasons of improved shelf life, the cheese was replaced by a cheese sauce (you can buy jars of the stuff). Now there was no need for an oven to melt the cheese and so the fast-food version of nachos was born. After the dish started to be sold at American sporting events in the 1970s, there was no stopping it.