Farm Kitchen Chronicles: Vegetarian Tamale Pie
A healthy version of a dish inspired by one of my childhood Texas favorites, the Frito Pie
In college, long ago, I had a dinner party (just a few of my friends) and where I served wine and made a vegan tamale pie. I used a recipe from one of my first cookbooks I ever owned, which was based on recipes from The Farm, an intentional community in Tennessee. This was the book that taught me I could get vitamin B12 from nutritional yeast, and how to make tofu and tempeh and soy milk. In retrospect, there was way too much tofu in every recipe in that cookbook, including their tamale pie recipe. I created this tamale pie recipe to be more nutritious, and with no tofu (instead I used pinto beans, keeping in vegetarian).
Perhaps one reason I love tamale pie is childhood nostalgia. Growing up in Texas, my mom would sometimes make for dinner the Tex-Mex lowbrow staple, Frito Pie. In the Midwest, you can find its cousin, the Walking Taco, served at certain restaurant counters, but in Texas, you will see the Frito Pie everywhere, from football games to food co-ops, as ubiquitous as the Texas armadillo.
The inventor of the Frito Pie is highly disputed by many, and the Frito Pie itself is actually hardly a recipe: a bag of Fritos with chili poured on top. Football games will serve it directly from the bag, ripped open with a ladle full of chili and eaten with a plastic spoon. Restaurants or diners will have the Fritos spilled into actual bowls, and sometimes with Fritos sprinkled on top. In New Mexico, it is said to have been created by a woman named Teresa Hernadez in the 1960s at a Woolworth’s in Santa Fe, when she started selling torn-open bags of the corn chips at the counter and spooning her mother’s homemade red chili into it.
Texans will often re-buff this claim, and say it was invented by San Antonio resident Daisy Doolin, the mother of Fritos creator Charles Doolin, during a campaign called “Cooking with Fritos” as a way to promote the corn chip. Doolin’s recipe differed, as it added shredded cheese, sour cream and toppings like green onions. She created other recipes that did not exactly, um, catch on (like Frito meatloaf and a Frito fruitcake—ew), but Frito Pie actually went on to become popularized when it was printed on the backs of Frito bags starting in 1962, the start of its journey as a junk food culinary delight.