gordita

Gordita is a Spanish diminutive: gorda (fat woman or fat thing) reduced by the suffix -ita to little fat one. The adjective gordo comes from Latin gurdus, a word that Roman grammarians recorded as meaning dull or sluggish, apparently applied as slang to heavy or slow people. By medieval Castilian, gordo had shifted to mean simply fat or thick. The leap from adjective to food name is not unusual in Spanish: chorizo, tostada, and pelada all follow the same pattern of physical description becoming culinary category.

The gordita is a thick disc of masa or wheat flour dough, cooked on a comal or fried, then either split to receive a filling or left whole and topped. It is the food that matches the word perfectly: round, thick, and substantial. In northern Mexico, particularly in Nuevo León, Coahuila, and Chihuahua, gorditas are made with wheat flour and often deep-fried. In central and southern Mexico, corn masa is the standard base, pressed by hand to a thickness three or four times that of a standard tortilla.

The regional split between corn and wheat reflects the agricultural geography of colonial Mexico. Spanish settlers promoted wheat cultivation in the arid north, where it performed better than corn, and northern cooks absorbed wheat into forms that already existed in corn. The gordita made in Chihuahua with wheat flour and lard is a direct descendent of the masa gordita of central Mexico, translated into a new grain but keeping the same shape and the same name.

In the United States, Taco Bell introduced a product called the Gordita in 1998, a soft flour pocket filled with seasoned ground beef. The marketing was aimed at consumers unfamiliar with the original, and the name shifted from specialized Mexican food term to a chain-restaurant brand word within a single television advertising cycle. Mexican-American food writers noted with some irritation that the actual gordita predates Taco Bell by several centuries and tastes nothing like the chain's version.