Tex-Mex cuisine is an American regional cuisine that derives from the culinary creations of the Tejano people of Texas. It has spread from border states such as Texas and others in the Southwestern United States to the rest of the country as well as Canada. Tex-Mex is most popular in Texas and neighboring areas, especially nearby states in both the US and Mexico. It is a subtype of Southwestern cuisine found in the American Southwest.
Common dishes
Some ingredients are common in Mexican cuisine, but other ingredients not typically used in Mexico are often added. Tex-Mex cuisine is characterized by its heavy use of shredded cheese, meat, beans, peppers and spices, in addition to flour tortillas. Sometimes various Tex-Mex dishes are made without the use of a tortilla, an extremely common example of this is the "fajita bowl", which is a fajita served without a soft tortilla. Generally cheese plays a much bigger role in Tex-Mex food than in mainstream Mexican cuisine, particularly in the popularity of Chile con queso which is often eaten with chips, or may be served over enchiladas, tamales or burritos. Moreover, Tex-Mex has imported flavors from other spicy cuisines, such as the use of cumin, introduced by Spanish immigrants to Texas from the Canary Islands and used in Berber cuisine, but used in only a few central Mexican recipes.
History
During the mission era, Spanish and Mexican cuisines were combined in Texas as in other parts of the northern frontier of New Spain. However, the cuisine that would come to be called Tex-Mex originated with Tejanos as a mix of native Mexican and Spanish foods when Texas was part of New Spain and later Mexico. served in a tex-mex style, with pork, beef, cheddar and monterey jack on top. From the South Texas region between San Antonio, the Rio Grande Valley and El Paso, this cuisine has had little variation, and from earliest times has always been influenced by the cooking in the neighboring northern states of Mexico. The ranching culture of South Texas and Northern Mexico straddles both sides of the border, where beef, grilled food, and tortillas have been common and popular foods for more than a century. A taste for cabrito, barbacoa de cabeza, carne seca, and other products of cattle culture is also common on both sides of the Rio Grande. In the 20th century, as goods from the United States became cheap and readily available, Tex-Mex took on such Americanized elements as cheddar, jack, and pimento cheeses. In much of Texas, the cooking styles on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border were the same until a period after the U.S. Civil War. With the railroads, American ingredients and cooking appliances became common on the U.S. side. A 1968 Los Angeles Times feature wrote "f the dish is a combination of Old World cooking, hush-my-mouth Southern cuisine and Tex-Mex, it's from the Texas Hill Country."
Outside the US
In France, Paris's first Tex-Mex restaurant opened in March 1983. According to restaurateur Claude Benayoun, business had been slow, but after the 1986 release of the film Betty Blue, which featured characters drinking tequila shots and eating chili con carne, "everything went crazy." According to Benayoun, "Betty Blue was like our Easy Rider; it was unbelievably popular in France. And after the movie came out, everybody in Paris wanted a shot of tequila and a bowl of chili." Tex-Mex has also spread to Thailand, Argentina, Oman, Japan, the Netherlands, and Mexico.
Terminology
The word "TexMex" was first used to abbreviate the Texas Mexican Railway, chartered in southern Texas in 1875. In the 1920s, the hyphenated form was used in American newspapers to describe Texans of Mexican ancestry. The Oxford English Dictionary supplies the first-known uses in print of "Tex-Mex" in reference to food, from a 1963 article in The New York Times Magazine, and a 1966 item in the Great BendTribune. Diana Kennedy, an influential food authority, explained the distinctions between Mexican cuisine and Americanized Mexican food in her 1972 book The Cuisines of Mexico. Robb Walsh of the Houston Press said the book "was a breakthrough cookbook, one that could have been written only by a non-Mexican. It unified Mexican cooking by transcending the nation's class divisions and treating the food of the poor with the same respect as the food of the upper classes." The term "Tex-Mex" also saw increasing usage in the Los Angeles Times from the 1970s onward while the Tex-Mex label became a part of U.S. vernacular during the late 1960s, '70s, and '80s. Adán Medrano, a chef who grew up in San Antonio, prefers to call the food "Texas Mexican," which he says was the indigenous cooking of South Texas long before the Rio Grande marked the border between Texas and Mexico.
