Fajitas Period BOrigin theory BVerified

A fajita is beef skirt steak — the thin cut from near the diaphragm — grilled quickly over an open flame and wrapped in a tortilla. It is usually served with chili peppers and onions.

The dish is bound up with the cattle-raising of Texas. Cattle became widely available through the ranching that followed their introduction to the New World, and among the cuts, skirt steak was the portion passed to the cowhands when an animal was butchered. The tortilla and the chili pepper were long-established local foods, on everyday tables from early on. What remained was the plain, fast method of grilling the meat over direct heat on a griddle or grate. That the star of the dish is not a prime cut but the meat handed to the men on the ground says much about where it comes from.

The name itself tells that origin. Fajita comes from the Spanish faja, 'strip' or 'band' (from Latin fascia), with a diminutive ending — 'little strip of meat.' From before the 1940s the word already denoted the diaphragm muscle of the steer. It appears in English writing only from the late 1960s into the early 1970s — between 1968 and 1971 — so the dish is not, as a dish, an old one.

Carried to the table sizzling on a hot plate, the fajita looks every bit a restaurant invention. But trace its beginning and you arrive somewhere plainer and more specific: the butchering yard of a Texas ranch.

In the 1930s, on ranches in south and west Texas, some of the scrap cuts left from butchering were given to the cowhands (vaqueros) as part of their wages. One of these was skirt steak, the thin cut from near the diaphragm. They grilled it quickly over an open flame and wrapped it in a tortilla to fill their stomachs — a meal made from the day's leftovers. That the name means 'little strip of meat' fits that origin without strain.

The first to study this ranch origin academically was Homero Recio, who took a graduate degree in animal science at Texas A&M in 1984. Prompted by the rising retail price of skirt steak, he gathered interviews reaching back to the scrap-meat meals of the 1930s, the way they were grilled, and the Spanish nickname for the cut. His account of the etymology and the dates of the earliest English attestations do not conflict with the dictionary record; language, scholarship, and local testimony draw a single picture.

Coming out as a commercial product happened much later. In September 1969 Sonny Falcón, a meat-market manager, ran the first fajita-taco stand at a festival in Kyle. That same year, at the Round-Up Restaurant in Pharr, Otilia Garza began serving the meat still steaming on a sizzling plate. In 1973 the dish spread to a wider public through Ninfa Laurenzo's restaurant in Houston, and in 1982 George Weidmann at the Hyatt in Austin put 'sizzling fajitas' on the menu, from where it fanned out to national chains. The showy fajita everyone now pictures, in other words, is the dressing that restaurants later put on a ranch-hand's meal.

From a cowhand's share to a restaurant's signature — beneath the flashy presentation lies, unmistakably, the plain food of the Texas vaqueros.