Who invented nachos?
Ignacio Anaya, nicknamed Nacho, made the first plate in 1943 at the Victory Club in Piedras Negras, Mexico. He threw it together for American visitors and called it Nacho's Special.
NachosPlate of nachos with cheese, salsa and sour cream570kcal
A town on the border
Piedras Negras sits in the Mexican state of Coahuila, right across the Rio Grande from Eagle Pass, Texas. During the Second World War there was an American military base near Eagle Pass, and the wives of the officers there would cross the river to shop and eat. One of the places they went was the Victory Club, also called Club Victoria. Its maître d' was Ignacio Anaya, born in Coahuila in 1895. Like many men named Ignacio, he went by Nacho.
The day in 1943
In 1943 a group of those wives, led by a regular named Mamie Finan, came in wanting something to eat. The details shift a little between tellings. One version says the cook could not be found, another that the visitors had found other places closed. Either way, Anaya went into the kitchen himself. He cut fried corn tortillas into triangles, added grated cheese and sliced pickled jalapeños, and heated the lot. Asked what it was called, he named it after himself, Nacho's Special.
What the sources agree on
Unlike most famous foods, nachos have one named inventor, a place and a year, and the sources mostly agree on all three. They differ on the small stuff. TIME says the cheese was cheddar, Wikipedia says Colby. Wikipedia and El Universal say nachos first showed up in an English language cookbook, A Taste of Texas, in 1949, while Anaya's own recipe was printed in the St. Anne's Cookbook of Eagle Pass in 1954. Small gaps like these are normal for a snack made in a hurry eighty years ago.
From one town to every stadium
The snack went onto the Victory Club menu and was soon copied around town. In 1959 a waitress named Carmen Rocha brought nachos to Los Angeles. The big jump came in 1976, when Frank Liberto of Ricos Products sold a version with cheese sauce at Texas Rangers games. Then on 4 September 1978 sportscaster Howard Cosell kept talking about nachos during a Monday Night Football broadcast, and that took them much further. Stadium nachos were here to stay.
Nacho's legacy
Anaya never tried to own his idea. El Universal quotes him saying he made it to keep his customers happy and well fed. In 1960 he opened his own restaurant, El Nacho. He died in 1975. A bronze plaque in Piedras Negras now honours him, and 21 October is kept as the International Day of the Nacho. A typical plate today is a pile of tortilla chips under melted cheese and jalapeños, often with beans, salsa or sour cream, which is a lot more than Nacho put on his.