Fritos® Pie: Stories, Recipes, and More

Foreword by Davia Nelson of The Kitchen Sisters

◆ ix Birth of the Frito A Foreword by Davia Nelson of the Kitchen Sisters Producers of NPR’s Hidden Kitchens I F yoU’RE looking for hidden kitchen stories, Texas is a good place to start. It’s a state that’s chock full of iconic food with a good story behind it, food that says America. A man with a used potato ricer, some masa, and a dream. It’s the stuff our country is made of. We call them kitchen pioneers and visionaries . And Texas in the 1930s was swarming with them. Men, mostly, who dreamed up the 7-Eleven, the Slurpee, the frozen margarita, Dr. Pepper, and the Frito—and changed the way we ate and drank. We first heard about the birth of the Frito when we were in Dallas gathering stories for our Hidden Kitchens series on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, a project that chronicles secret, little-known, below-the-radar cooking in America—how communities come together through food. We’d had a long day recording at Fuel City, a palace of a gas station in the shadow of Interstate 30, with twenty-four pumps, a jumping taco stand, a woman selling corn out of a cooler, a herd of longhorns, an oil well, and a swimming pool with bikini-clad pool models. If Hugh Hefner had a gas station, it might look something like this. Night came. We were strangers in a strange land. Where to eat? A friend had told us to call his pal, Alan Govenar, for advice . Alan is the founder of Documentary Arts, a non-profit organization that champions and chronicles folk and traditional arts through photography, radio, film, festivals, workshops, and new media. Alan invited us over to his archive and walked us through his astounding collection. When Kaleta Doolin, Alan’s wife, joined us for a dinner of barbecue and pie, the four of us were becoming fast friends. We talked about Hidden Kitchens and the kinds of Texas kitchen stories we were collecting. After the ribs, we came back to see Kaleta’s archive. Kaleta is an artist, filmmaker, community ac- x ◆ FOREWORD tivist, and Texan. Around midnight she began to tell us about her family. Her father, it seemed, had invented the Frito: “He was consumed by Fritos. He worked incessantly—at home, on vacation, on weekends. He loved it. He experimented in the kitchen at home. We were his guinea pigs.” “Wait. Stop, don’t say another word.” We ran and got our mic and machine and she began to tell us her extraordinary American family saga. It was a magical night. We recorded for hours around a big table under low lights and were mesmerized. It was so late, and quiet, and dream-like, with Kaleta’s beautiful voice pulling the memories together. It was about two o’clock in the morning when we left. Kaleta Doolin grew up in Dallas, the daughter of Charles Elmer Doolin, the founder of the Frito Company. Doolin had a bakery in San Antonio, a confectionery. It was 1932. He wanted to have chips on the counter. Tortilla chips staled too easily. C. E. Doolin was a man of many hidden kitchens. He had the kitchen off to the side of his office. He had a kitchen at home. He had factories, and on a counter in his office, he had a line of Bunsen burners with little tripods with metal trays on top of them. He was always experimenting, mixing up new flavors. He’d call the employees into his office and have them taste the different flavorings for the chips. There was a secret ingredient in Doolin’s Frito. It was his own strain of corn. He had experimental farms where he was hybridizing corn and trying to discover ways to use the by-products . Meanwhile, he and his brother invented a lot of the foodproduction machinery for the Frito factories, using conveyor belts like Henry Ford did for automobiles. They mechanized the production of snack food. He worked constantly. He had a recording machine in his car to dictate new business ideas and recipes. Texas of that era was a hotbed of populist thinking. It was a right-to-work state, a can-do kind of place. The East Texas oil fields were discovered in the midst of the Great Depression. There was hope that people could make something out of nothing . C. E. Doolin was part of that spirit. He also...