Despite not having much belief in any specific religious system, I want to believe that the cheese enchilada is a gift from some actually-real, benevolent god who wants us to be happy, and just decided one day that shoving cheese into a tortilla and slathering it with warm sauce was the best way to do that.
But I know the enchilada is actually rooted in more than a thousand years of culture, of hard work, of agricultural innovation, of perseverance. The dish’s origins date back to antiquity, and it starts appearing in literature in 1756, when Spanish conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote down the first description of enchiladas. From there, the history gets a bit messy, with each region in Mexico boasting its own recipes for the dish, stuffing tortillas with everything from picadillo to huitlacoche. There are countless enchilada iterations, and I think that’s beautiful.
The version I first encountered at a Louisiana Tex-Mex restaurant in the 1980s was decidedly removed from the dish’s origins: bright yellow processed cheese stuffed inside an industrial corn tortilla and slathered in even more cheesy sauce. It was, in a word, perfect. Later, I would encounter more sophisticated versions of cheesy enchiladas, sometimes with roasted veggies tucked alongside the cheese for added texture, or bathed in tangy tomatillo salsa, and I devoured them all.