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THE GREAT BURRITO QUEST: ORIGIN of the MISSION BURRITO
As the story goes, the burrito began as street food during the Mexican Revolution. Sometime between 1910 and 1921, Juan Mendes sold tacos from a donkey cart in the Bella Vista neighborhood of Cuidad Juarez. To keep his tacos warm, Juan began wrapping his food inside large homemade flour tortillas. He referred to his treats as “food of the burrito”, In Spanish burrito means “little donkey”. Think of Juan’s cart as one of the original food trucks.
The name, burrito, may have referred to the appearance of the new food. Either it looked like a donkey’s ear or resembled the rolled bed blankets the animals carried on their backs. Whichever the case, burritos quickly became a hit.
The original burritos were small, thin and contained only one or two ingredients (meat, potato, beans, cheese or chili relleno).
.By the 1930s, the burrito had migrated out of Cuidad Juarez to Tucson, Arizona and west to Los Angeles. They arrived in the City of Angles in 1923 when they were featured at the famous El Cholo Spanish Café. The term burrito first appeared in print in a 1934 newspaper article and was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1958.
The burrito’s popularity spread into the American Southwest, Texas and across to California but not south into Mexico. In Mexico, they are a regional food of the north of the country. Beyond the border region, burritos are commonly known as tacos de harina meaning wheat flour tacos.
In California, where burritos are king, we are divided north and south. The SoCal-style resembles Juan’s original burrito. These are thin, simple and don’t contain rice. This was how burritos were served until the 1960s when the NorCal-style was born. The NorCal or Mission-style burrito is a plump, hefty appetite crusher filled with meat, rice, beans, and salsa. Soon sour cream and guacamole found their way into these tasty, foil-wrapped monsters.
The origin of the first Mission burrito is worth investigating and luckily the HEAD Society needs go no further than San Francisco’s Mission District (Mission burrito. Get it?). There are two taquerias claiming to have produced first of the line:
Story #1 – On September 26, 1961, a group of hungry firefighters stopped by El Faro (the Lighthouse) on Folsom Street. The owner, Febronio Ontiveros, created something special. His giant burrito became a hit and the style spread far and wide.
Story #2 – On September 29, 1969, a small taqueria on Valencia Street abandoned the thin, simple burrito and rolled up a new “little donkey” that broke with the past. That taqueria, La Cumbre (the best, the peak) is credited with launching a culinary movement.
Take your pick!