Don't Be An Ass

Saucyman, What do donkeys have to do with Burritos, please don’t tell me the filling, please don’t tell me the filling, please don’t tell me the filling. – Saucito

Burrito is the diminutive of Burro, Spanish for donkey. Burrito first appeared in newsprint in 1934, but had been on the menu at LA’s El Cholo since 1931. Other than denoting when the word was first used, the etymology is fuzzy and again the creation story seems to have been retrofitted to explain a food that has probably been consumed in one form or another for centuries. Here you have a choice: Burritos are little donkeys because the original vendor sold his antojitos – little whimsies – from the back of a cart pulled by a donkey in Juarez. Another account explains that when it is rolled, a burrito looks like the blanket under the saddle on the back of a donkey. I guess. My experience with saddled asses is pretty much restricted to filtered cultural representations of Poncho Villa, so, I guess a burrito could look like that – Agnolotti, the Italian ravioli, means little lamb, I don’t see that resemblance either.

Innocently, the word could have its origin in some forgotten pun or play on words, like refried beans, which are fried neither once nor twice but are definitely beans. Malevolently, it is possible the food’s name suggests something untoward about its contents – a heavily spiced, unrecognizable meat hidden underneath an edible wrapper. More than one culture’s food has been slandered for not being English Beefsteak, urban legends of cats and curry, dogs and dim sum, rats and the chicken fryer still abound. It is easy to speculate, easier than applying for research grants and actually studying the phenomena, that burrito/donkey meat speculation is another example of labeling the food of the poor as suspect, tainted & unwholesome.

Before there were burritos, there were tortillas de harina – wheat tacos, a strange bastardized food of arid northern Mexico. As tortillas de harina migrated into Texas, they morphed into something different - They grew in size, because as anyone who has ever changed planes at the Dallas airport and witnessed the mass of humanity can testify, everything really is bigger in Texas. And it wasn’t only the size of the burrito that changed, meat became the dominant filling, sour cream, cheese were added. Occasionally deep-fried or smothered, the food became something it previously wasn’t .

Should the name change as the food evolves? Because there is nothing diminutive about a half-pound of beef and 4 oz of cheese rolled into a tortilla the size of a beach towel. Even so, it is a little too late in the game to start calling the food gran asno. Even if eating burritos as big as your head might be the cause of big asses.