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.' According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word first appears in English print in 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 serious study of this ranch origin is said to be the one Homero Recio carried out in 1984 as graduate research in animal science at Texas A&M. Prompted by the rising retail price of skirt steak, he collected anecdotes tracing the scrap-meat meals, the way they were grilled, and the Spanish nickname for the cut back to the ranches of south and west Texas in the 1930s.

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. Ninfa Laurenzo's restaurant, opened in Houston in 1973, was among those that spread the dish through Houston and the Rio Grande Valley during the 1970s. In 1982 George Weidmann at the Hyatt in Austin put 'sizzling fajitas' on the menu, and the recipe was passed on to other hotels in the Hyatt chain. 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 the plain food of the Texas vaqueros.