burrito

burrito, a common cylindrical food item of Mexican and American origin consisting of a tortilla wrapped around a mixed filling of such ingredients as meat, cheese, beans, and vegetables.  The burrito differs from the taco in that the circular tortilla in the latter case is simply folded, not wrapped. The deep-fried version of the burrito, popular throughout the American Southwest, is the chimichanga.

The food of Mexico varies widely by region, depending on what is grown there. On the broad coastal plain of the northern state of Sonora, wheat and livestock are central to the agricultural economy, and wheat flour and beef are widely consumed instead of the usual maize (corn), pork, and poultry of more mountainous regions to the south. The burrito is the product of this regional difference: probably invented in Sonora, it consists of a large flour tortilla wrapped around a filling of meat, often beef, combined with beans, rice, salsa, and other ingredients. Like a taco, a burrito can contain just about anything and be called a burrito (or “burro,” for there is no fixed usage distinguishing the two terms), and local variations can contain ingredients as diverse as Chinese sweet-and-sour pork, Thai lemongrass, and Polish kielbasa sausage.

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Lumpy and cylindrical, the burrito takes its name, according to one theory, from the bedroll that Mexican miners and travelers would drape across the saddle of a donkey, or burro in Spanish. Another possible origin suggests that street vendors sold burritos from baskets attached sidesaddle to their burros, the conveyance transferring its name to the thing conveyed.

Whatever the origin, the burrito was present in other regions of Mexico as well, attested in a standard dictionary of Mexican Spanish in 1895 as a maize tortilla encasing a filling and found in the region of Mexico City as well as coastal Veracruz. Immigrants from both central Mexico and Sonora introduced the burrito to Los Angeles in the 1930s, about the time that the first recipe for it appeared in an American cookbook.

The flour-tortilla-wrapped Sonoran burrito grew measurably larger when it crossed the international border and found a welcome home in southern California. Claimed as an invention of both California and Texas, one variant is the “breakfast burrito,” which typically contains enough food for a couple of meals, with eggs, beans, cheese, chile, avocados, tomatoes, salsa, potatoes, bacon, chorizo sausage, or many such components. A lunch or dinner burrito typically comprises a similarly wide range of ingredients, a single helping often providing an entire day’s worth of recommended calories.

A deep-fried burrito is known in the Southwest as a chimichanga. Several restaurants in Arizona and New Mexico claimed to have originated the dish in the mid 20th century, but it has been traced to mining towns more than a century earlier in the Mexican state of Sinaloa and to Chinese mine workers who ate it as a local approximation of an egg roll. In some regions of Mexico the chimichanga is called a chivichanga. The chimichanga has become a fixture on menus in Mexican restaurants throughout the United States and Canada.