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.
At some point in my life, I stopped ordering the cheese enchilada. I was, in large part, allured by the sizzle and scent of a plate of fajitas heading to the table, but I also decided that cheese enchiladas were for people who were too picky or too wimpy to enjoy a meat-stuffed taco slathered in spicy salsa. It was also the perennial order of my younger brother, who I spent most of my time fighting with over something or another. As a teenager and young adult, there was nothing I wanted to be more than sophisticated and worldly, the kind of person who orders the most unfamiliar thing on the menu. There was just too much out there to try to stick with something as basic as an enchilada.
I probably went at least a decade without eating one, and what a loss for me that was. In recent years, though, I’ve made a return to the cheese enchilada, and it’s quickly become one of the most important comfort dishes in my life. Its return began, I think, as a highly specific and nostalgic craving for the version served at La Familia, the now-shuttered Mexican restaurant my family ate at all the time when I was a teenager growing up in Paris, Texas. Still, I cannot trace its comeback in my personal dining repertoire to a specific instance, perhaps because the cheese enchilada is perfect in whatever form it is encountered. Even if it is bad, maybe a little cold and filled with half-melted cheese or basted in a bland sauce, it’s still pretty goddamn good.
When I have been away from Texas for more than about 48 hours, I start to crave a cheese enchilada. It’s not that they don’t exist in other places — of course they do, incredible Mexican food exists all over the country — it’s just that there’s no need for me to go in search of a great cheese enchilada when I am anywhere else, no reason to search for sand when I live in a vast desert dotted with more Tex-Mex temples than I can count. As a (mostly) lifelong Texan, that’s always what I come back home to, whether or not I’ve actually left the Lone Star State.
The cheese enchilada is, essentially, a canvas. A place where the spices in a richly flavored mole or tangy tomatillo sauce can shine against a rich, cheesy backdrop. Some might argue that chicken, that blandest of proteins, is a better canvas for these flavors, but they would be wrong. Cheese makes everything better, whether it’s the yellow processed stuff found at pedestrian Tex-Mex chains like Chuy’s (delicious, perfect) or soft queso panela, all forms of cheese are welcome here. A corn tortilla is a must, though I respect the Midwesterners devoted to their pillowy, saucy interpretation of the dish, always served in flour tortillas.
And then, of course, there is the sauce. As long as it’s good, I’m not picky about what shrouds my cheese enchilada. As a Texan, I love rich, meaty chile con carne, but I can also appreciate the tanginess and creamy texture of a sour cream sauce, especially when spiked with roasted poblano or spicy chiles. Mole, too, with its nutty complexity, is great, especially when ordered alongside a cantaloupe agua fresca at Dona Maria, the strip mall restaurant I eat lunch at weekly with my spouse.
I am not alone in my appreciation of the cheese enchilada — if you know, you know. I think often of Houstonian and author Bryan Washington’s 2022 essay “All Enchiladas Are Perfect. But These Are My Favorite.” “Enchiladas are warm hugs, enveloped in tortillas and blanketed in sauce,” he wrote, encapsulating the dish’s emotional impact on those who grew up with it in one single sentence. Lisa Fain, a cookbook author who writes as the Homesick Texan, was equally wistful in her longing for a plate of enchiladas slathered in chile con carne, that rich, meaty gravy that’s abundant on Tex-Mex platters across the state, when she left the state.
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Once the cheese enchilada has you in its melty grip, it cannot be removed from your psyche. It lingers in the back of your mind, just waiting for the opportunity to turn a bad day into a decent one. If someone’s being annoying at work, or you get a flat tire, you can always say “fuck this, when I get off, I’m going to eat a cheese enchilada.” That enchilada might not fix your problems, but you’re not going to be thinking about them as you admire a perfect cheese pull, and sometimes that’s good enough.
For me, and so many others, the cheese enchilada is more than just a reminder of home, or of what feels intimately familiar — it’s a touchstone you can always come back to, an omnipresent source of comfort. Amid all the horrors that swirl among us, I am not ashamed to admit that I am relying on these kinds of comforts as a steadying force right now. These hellish years of war, economic uncertainty, and every-fucking-thing-else might steal my sanity, but I’ll never go a decade without an enchilada again.
