We pick up the fajita trail in Houston in 1973, when a Rio Grande Valley native named Ninfa Rodriguez Laurenzo opened a Tex-Mex restaurant on Navigation Boulevard called Ninfa's. In the Mexican ranching states that share a border with Texas, a similar dish called arracheras (grilled fillets of skirt steak) has been served for decades, according to cookbook authors Cheryl and Bill Jamison in The Border Cookbook. At the Round-Up, fajitas were served on a sizzling platter with warm flour tortillas and mounds of condiments guacamole, pico de gallo (chopped fresh onions, tomatoes, peppers, and cilantro), and grated cheese for making tacos. Morthland writes that Garza never claimed to have invented the dish, but she did maintain a tradition of grilling skirt steak learned from her grandmother, a restaurateur in Reynosa, Mexico. That same year, fajitas debuted on the menu at Otilia Garza's Round-Up Restaurant in the Rio Grande Valley community of Pharr, according to Texas Monthly contributing editor John Morthland in a 1993 magazine story. Sonny Falcon, an Austin meat market manager, operated the first commercial fajita taco concession stand at a rural Dies Y Seis celebration in tiny Kyle in September of 1969. Considering the limited number of skirts per carcass and the fact the meat wasn't available commercially, the fajita tradition remained regional and relatively obscure for many years, probably only familiar to vaqueros, butchers, and their families.įajitas appear to have made the quantum leap from campfire and backyard grill obscurity to commercial sales in 1969. Fifth-generation McAllen rancher and cookbook author Melissa Guerra heard very similar stories in researching her first cookbook, The Texas Provincial Kitchen, and her upcoming work, Dishes of the Wild Horse Desert. Hearty border dishes like barbacoa de cabeza (head barbecue), menudo (tripe stew), and fajitas/arracheras (grilled skirt steak) have their roots in this practice. Throwaway items such as the hide, the head, the entrails, and meat trimmings such as skirt were given to the Mexican vaqueros (cowboys) as part of their pay. During cattle roundups, beef were butchered regularly to feed the hands. Recio found anecdotal evidence describing the cut of meat, the cooking style (directly on a campfire or on a grill), and the Spanish nickname going back as far as the 1930s in the ranch lands of South and West Texas. Recio was intrigued by a spike in the retail price of skirt steak, and that sparked his research into the dish that took the once humble skirt steak from throwaway cut to menu star. The first serious study of the history of fajitas was done in 1984 by Homero Recio as part of his graduate work in animal science at Texas A&M. It only makes sense that several people from the same ethnic group with roots in the same geographic area would come up with similar cooking techniques and names for the raw materials at hand. In exploring the history of fajitas, several credible stories emerge, and all of them have roots in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Texas is the proud home of an authentic regional cuisine, and the provenance of Tex-Mex foods is currently a very hot topic with everyone from academic researchers to cookbook authors to magazine and newspaper food writers. It seems the more we learn about the ethnic melting pot that makes up the American table, the more curious we become about regional cuisines and the origin of specific dishes. One of the most interesting facets of the American culinary revolution of the past 50 years is our growing fascination with culinary history. During the Seventies, Sonny Falcon would turn Texans into fajita fanatics at concession stands across the state.
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