Fritos pie or Fritos chili pie or simply Frito pie—whatever you call it—is a much-loved delight often spooned up under Friday night lights.
I’ve heard many baby boomers claim their mother invented the dish out of necessity to feed incessantly hungry kids back in the 1950s. 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.
A version of Frito pie was served at a gathering of the Dallas Dietetic Association in 1949. The recipe came from the Frito Co. itself and originally called for putting a layer of Fritos in a casserole dish, covering it with chili and then covering everything with liberal amounts of cheese and onions. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes.
You can see how this got MacGyvered into just pouring chili into bags of Fritos for efficiency and transportability. Today, you’ll also find it with the added ingredient of a mound of jalapeños on top.
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Whatever the case, Fritos and the pies are Texas originals.
Charles Doolin of San Antonio created the chips, putting his own spin on a recipe he bought for $100 from a Mexican restaurant in 1932. He fried strips of corn dough, and Fritos were born. It’s interesting that most Texans now associate the chip with piles of meat, as Doolin was a vegetarian.
He called them fritos, Spanish for “fried.” Doolin also invented Cheetos, around 1948, by the way.
In the 1960s, my mother made something she called “creamed tacos,” which was a cheesy chili con carne poured over a plate of Fritos. Exceptionally filling, the recipe no doubt came from Frito-Lay itself. Though the company, now based in Plano, had its own brand of chili by then, my mother, like Hank Hill, preferred Wolf Brand Chili (“Neighbor, how long has it been?”), another Texas original.
This type of mixing and matching was encouraged in the early days of Fritos—as they were not marketed as a stand-alone snack. They were sold as an ingredient for casseroles. The inventor’s wife, Mary Kathryn “Kitty” Doolin, even experimented with pouring chocolate over Fritos and baking them on a cookie sheet.
Kitty also is credited with coming up with the original chili pie recipe. We know this because her daughter, Kaleta Doolin, wrote the most thorough history on the subject you can find, her 2011 book Fritos Pie: Stories, Recipes, and More. It’s an incredibly detailed history that provides all manner of Fritos recipes you have never imagined. Maybe there’s another classic in there, waiting to be popularized in today’s world of spicy snack foods.
Along with her mother, Kaleta gives credit to another woman for popularizing the dish. She writes with admiration that Teresa Hernandez sold thousands of Fritos chili pies at the Woolworth’s counter in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the 1960s, reportedly selling 56,000 bags in one year.
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 profits from Frito pies.
