Fritos® Pie: Stories, Recipes, and More

Chapter 1 San Antonio

Chapter 1 San Antonio C oRN CHIPS, which are derived from corn masa like that used in tortillas, were originally developed by Gustavo olguin. My father worked for him as a fry cook for a short time. olguin had been a soccer coach in his native Mexico . He and his business partner, whose name doesn’t survive, wanted to move back to Mexico, so they sold Gustavo’s recipe, his adapted hand-operated potato ricer, and nineteen accounts to my dad. The price was $100. olguin’s business partner loaned twenty dollars to my father (which he soon paid back), and my grandmother hocked her wedding ring for the other eighty dollars . (For a complete account of this transaction see appendix 3, “Letter from C. E. Doolin to the Frito Bandwagon.” The account was written by my father in 1957 in response to an article proposed by the editor of the Frito Bandwagon’s twenty-fifth The larger house, 1416 Roosevelt Avenue , San Antonio, Texas on November 7, 1926 is where Dad lived with his mother, father, and brother when the company started. The smaller house and garage were later annexed for the business. The Model-T was used for deliveries. The photo was taken in the fall of 1926. ◆ 1 ▼ Mother Doolin and her sister Blanche Brawley in their Sunday best. When she was helping Grandmother Doolin with her correspondence, my mother often wrote to Blanche in Gilmer, Texas. ▼▶ Office manager Mary Livingston officiating at a Fritos office party in 1946. She inscribed this photo “To Mother Doolin.” The party may have honored Grandmother Doolin in absentia after her first stroke. 2 ◆ ▶ The first two chairpersons of the Frito Company—my grandfather, Charles Bernard Doolin, who filled that role for the newly formed company in 1934, and my grandmother, Daisy Dean Stephenson Doolin, who stepped up in 1940 after my grandfather died. ▼ Dad at about twenty (left) with Mr. Armacoast (an employee) and customers in the Highland Park Confectionery . This is where it all began. anniversary edition. The Bandwagon was the company’s newsletter for many years, before the computer age. My paternal grandmother, who eventually became the chair of the Frito Company, was one of its four founders—the other three were my father; his father, Charles Bernard Doolin; and my father’s brother, Earl Bernard Doolin. My paternal grandfather died in 1940, six years after the company was chartered. I believe he had a stroke three years before his death and at that point my grandmother inherited the chairmanship from him. Her real name was Daisy Dean Doolin but she was always called “Mother” Doolin by everyone, including the company’s employees . She had white sausage curls and wore thick old lady shoes, lilac-scented perfume, and long floral print dresses. She took an active role in the company and was far from being merely a figurehead during her long tenure as chairman of the board. In 1932 Mother Doolin came up with the first recipe that included Fritos corn chips as an ingredient. Surprisingly, the recipe she invented was a fruitcake. The Doolin family confectionery where Dad worked, Highland Park Confectionery (so named because it was in San Antonio’s Highland Park, adjacent to the Highland Park Theatre), had a large poster of a fruitcake on the wall. That might have suggested the idea to her. It amazes me that through the sense of taste, I can begin SAN ANTONIO ◆ 3 Mother Doolin’s fruitcake recipe 4 ◆ to understand my grandmother. I made her fruitcake recipe for our family’s holiday celebration this year at Christmastime. With my first taste, I felt as if I could tell what she was thinking when she put Fritos into her fruitcake batter. The crushed Fritos were included along with candied pineapple , cherries, citron, lemon peel, orange peel, pecans, and blanched almonds. Since she probably baked the fruitcake at the same time the Fritos were made—she, my grandfather, my father, and my uncle made them at night at home, for sale in the confectionary the next day—she probably decided to throw in some broken Fritos to extend the fruitcake batter as well as add nutrition and the flavors of corn, vegetable oil, and salt. It was the Great Depression and it probably felt like a sin to discard good food in the form of...