A Harte Appetite: Going beyond chips and cheese

Michael David Monn will probably be celebrating Thursday. That's because Thursday is National Nachos Day and Monn is given to going overboard when it comes to arguably the most famous of Tex-Mex snacks.

A few years ago Monn broke into a snack bar in his hometown of Marysville, Tenn., at 5 a.m. on a Sunday, stripped naked, covered himself in nacho cheese, and then scaled an 8-foot-high wall to return to his car where he was nabbed, no doubt with some difficulty, by police.

Though his case is extreme, Monn is just one of millions of Americans who have embraced nachos as the ultimate finger food. Surveys even show that nacho cheese is now the No. 1 craving among pregnant women.

Those who aren't expecting find them almost as hard to resist. Nachos are now the single most common appetizer on the menus at casual restaurant chains, outranking both potato skins and chicken wings by a healthy -- or should I say unhealthy? -- margin. A typical serving contains about 1,700 calories, 95 grams of fat and far more than the recommended daily allowance of sodium. They've become so ubiquitous that even the History Channel felt it necessary to do a special on them a few years ago.

It all began in 1943 when Mamie Finan and a group of about a dozen fellow military wives from Fort Duncan in Eagle Pass, Texas, made a sojourn across the Rio Grande to Piedras Negras in the Mexican state of Coahulla to do some shopping. Exhausted and ready for some food and drink, they arrived at a restaurant called The Victory Club only to find the kitchen had already closed. The maitre d', a man named Ignacio Anaya, took pity on them and went back to the kitchen himself to see what he could find. Improvising, he grabbed some tortilla chips, grated some cheese on them, put them under the broiler, and topped each one with a jalapeno slice. They were a hit and Finan dubbed them "Nacho's Especiales," Nacho being the Mexican diminutive for Ignacio. Ultimately the name was shortened simply to nachos.

AARON EISENHAUER ~ aeisenhauer@semissourian.comThe Mansion on Turtle Creek Nachos are topped with salsa that includes shrimp.

The new concoction became something of the rage throughout southern Texas, but was largely unknown elsewhere. It wasn't until 1959 that it was introduced to California when Carmen Rocha, a waitress from San Antonio, began preparing nachos as an off menu treat at El Cholo, Jack Nicholson's favorite Los Angeles Mexican restaurant (mine too).

Then in the late 1970s an enterprising concessionaire named Frank Liberto came up with the idea of selling nachos at Arlington Stadium. One night he shrewdly arranged for them to be served to Howard Cosell before a "Monday Night Football" broadcast. The colorful sports reporter talked about them throughout the evening and for weeks afterward, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Tom Harte's book, "Stirring Words," is available at local bookstores. A Harte Appetite airs Fridays 8:49 a.m. on KRCU, 90.9 FM. Contact Tom at semissourian.com or at the Southeast Missourian, P.O. Box 699, Cape Girardeau, Mo., 63702-0699.