"Warm Crap in a Bag"

Fritos and chile and pie, oh my!

If you’re a foodie, you probably already know that anyplace where you find a popular delicacy, you’ll also find conflict over its origin.

Everybody wants a bite of success.

You take the world-famous Sachertorte pastry, in Vienna, which was the subject of a long ownership battle between the Sacher Hotel and the Demel Bakery over the right to claim "the Original Sachertorte."

Or you can come to Santa Fe and seek the story behind the mouth-watering Frito pie, our legendary lunch counter treat that…

Oh, sorry, you're not from here, and you don't know about Frito pies? Well, pay close attention, because this nuanced recipe quickly gets very complicated.

You cut open an individual bag of the snack food Fritos. Then you take some hot red chile, pinto beans, shredded cheese and chopped onions. Still with me?

You pour all that stuff into the Frito bag, cup it in your hand and jam that scalding sucker down your cakehole.

Okay, I just made up that last part. You're allowed to use a fork and take real bites, if you want to.

I had my first Frito pie years ago, as a tourist. I loved it! I couldn't believe my discovery. This one dish—okay, bag—covers all the major nutritional food groups! Grease, salt and carbohydrates! If only it had frosting!

The classic place to get one is the lunch counter at the Five & Dime, the successor to the old Woolworth's. That's where I had my first bag.

But don't just take my word for it. The noted chef and television personality Anthony Bourdain had a Frito pie at the Five & Dime back in 2013, and he said it reminded him of "warm crap in a bag." He also used the phrase "colostomy pie" in his review.

Colostomy pie. I guess that's what restaurant people would call "discomfort food."

A few days after saying that, Bourdain apologized. That happens to me all the time. I try something, I compare it to feces, but then I decide I really enjoyed it after all. It was just a tempest in a Frito bag.

Here's the thing you may not know. Lots of folks in Santa Fe consider this to be our dish, invented here. But some other people think it was created somewhere else, or that maybe it was even developed in the Frito-Lay corporate test kitchens in Texas.

How disgustingly crass and commercial would that be?

The sign on the door of the Five & Dime says, "Home of the World-Famous Frito Pie, as seen on television." I sure hope that doesn't refer to Bourdain, because, you know, "colostomy pie."

The "Home of the Frito Pie" claim might be just a tad dubious.

I mean, if you go to a Burger King, the "Home of the Whopper," you know exactly what that means. It means if you try selling your own hamburger and calling it a Whopper, you'll have a herd of lawyers in your face.

The Five & Dime folks might want to soften their claim just a bit. Like maybe, "The Time-Share Vacation Home of the Frito Pie."

Wikipedia's entry on the dish includes a story claiming the "true Frito pie originated only in the 1960s with Teresa Hernández, who worked at the F.W. Woolworth's lunch counter in Santa Fe, New Mexico."

That's nice, but wait a minute. Another woman, named Carmen Ornelas, died in New Mexico a few months ago, and her obituary said she was "credited with making the first Frito pie in the 1950s at the old downtown bus depot café…before she began working at Woolworth's."

Anyway. It's not worth arguing about. For sure, the Frito pie is the most famous Santa Fe thing that comes in a bag.

Unless you count farolitos.

Robert Basler’s humor column runs twice monthly in SFR. Email the author: bluecorn@sfreporter.com

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