Texas Food Explorer: Chile con Queso

A story of melting pots

As yet there is no one simple origin story for chile con queso.  Some people claim that it derives from fondue, and others vigorously deny that version of events.  I tend to agree with the fondue angle, only that the variance from fondue took place across the border in Mexico and and not in Texas.  And unlike so many other foods we came to know of as Tex-Mex. its entry point was El Paso, and not the Rio Grande Valley, though it would have been popularized in San Antonio, like everything else.

HomesickTexan.com

 From what I was able to glean on the internet this seems to be something of an offbeat theory, although, while I speak for myself here, the competing theories are not as fleshed out as what I am presenting. 

I see a lot of credit being given to Junior League cookbooks from the mid-to-late 1920s and various South Texas cities but I found an earlier recipe in an El Paso newspaper that seems to predate all others in the public prints.

 Yes it very much resembles a Mexican dish called queso fundido,  but look at the similarities between that word fundido and fondue.

Queso fundido, courtesy Goya Foods.

And witness all the other culture collisions between the German people and the Mexican people ranging from music to beer. I would think that carried over into food as well.  Yes I know fondue is Swiss but I am sure that more than a few Swiss Germans immigrated to Mexico over the centuries.

There’s banda music from western Mexico:

And of course conjunto from south Texas. I once read that at first you can’t see the German influence on San Antonio, but once it’s pointed out to you, you see (and hear) it everywhere:

You could say that German immigrants and Mexicans and Mexican-Americans had a melting pot going there, if you get my drift, and it did not only contain cheese and peppers and tomatoes.

 So anyway I have seen no earlier recipes for a dish explicitly named chile con queso than the one below. Here is that recipe, the earliest one I could find from the El Paso Herald from April of 1923….

(Note how it is presented even then as an old dish for El Pasoans, and not some novelty.)

I also believe that the popularity of queso ran alongside processed and canned foods such as Velveeta and Ro-Tel chiles — which blossomed from the early 20th Century on..  I believe that altered the way it was originally prepared in to what we know now as the standard queso, but it seems we are moving back towards variations on the original formula with whiter cheeses and meat and other ingredients, much like the recipe you see from the El Paso newspaper.

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