Christmas Style Burrito

The waitress at a sit-down restaurant on Central Avenue in Albuquerque sets down a menu and asks the question before a customer has settled into the booth. Red or green? A regular answers Christmas without looking up, and the order goes back to the kitchen. The burrito that arrives on a heavy white oval plate ten minutes later is sealed in a tight cylinder of warm flour tortilla, sliced once across the middle, and ladled along the long axis with two chile sauces: a deep brick-red gravy across one half, a forest-green gravy across the other, a clean diagonal seam between them where the cook stopped one ladle and started the next. A pile of shredded cheese has been melted across the top. The fork goes through the seam on the first bite, and the customer learns within ten seconds which chile the kitchen runs hotter that day.

The structural choice is the split sauce. A standard chile burrito comes covered in one sauce, red or green, picked by the eater at the order. The Christmas version refuses to choose: both sauces go on the same plate at the same time, side by side across one cylinder, so the diner gets every bite as a comparison rather than a commitment. The two halves do different work and depend on each other for the contrast. The red is built from dried, ripened pods rehydrated and simmered into a deep brick gravy that reads earthy and slightly sweet, with a warm slow burn. The green is built from fresh pods roasted whole, peeled, and cooked down with their own char, and it reads bright and grassy and sharper at the front of the tongue. Plating both is a structural call that turns one burrito into two halves of the same conversation, and the diagonal seam down the centre is where the meal happens.

The craft fails at the sauce more often than at the burrito. A red built on under-soaked dried chiles tastes dusty; one built on burnt pods tastes acrid; one built on a thickener and a tomato base instead of pure chile reads orange and sweet and not red at all. A green that has been simmered into a uniform khaki has lost the char the roasting was supposed to lock in; a green that has been thickened with cream or sour cream has been turned into a different sauce entirely and the comparison with the red collapses. The seam fails too: a kitchen that pours one sauce too thin lets it bleed under the cylinder and into the other side, and the plate arrives muddy red-green instead of clean red and clean green. The burrito itself has to be wrapped tight enough to keep its shape under two ladles of liquid; a slack roll dissolves at the bottom and the filling escapes into the chile.

Pull a fork through the seam and the contrast registers in three discrete waves. The red half tastes first of slow-cooked earth and dried fruit, then of a low warm burn that sits in the back of the throat. The green half tastes first of roasted char and fresh vegetable green, then of a sharper heat that flares at the tip of the tongue and fades faster. The cheese on top has gone yellow-melted and lacy at the rim where it touched the plate; the steam coming off the chile carries the toasted dried-pod aroma of the red and the green grass char of the new chile together. The tortilla under all of it has hydrated to a soft yielding shell that lifts on the fork in long ribbons. By the third bite a regular has decided which chile is hotter that day and is alternating to taste, taking the green when the red threatens to dominate and the red when the green burns too high.

The ordering grammar is fixed across the state. The waitress's standing question is red or green?, asked in English on the Anglo side of the menu and as roja o verde? in the Spanish-language transcript. Christmas is the third standing answer, recognised everywhere, with Navidad heard in the older bilingual restaurants. The 1999 New Mexico legislature went so far as to make Red or green? the official state question, the only state to have a question rather than a motto, which gives the joke a legal frame. A regular has a default chile, a holiday default of Christmas, and an opinion on which restaurant runs the hotter green. A first-time visitor who picks one chile by accident is gently informed by the table that the right answer is Christmas, particularly in autumn after the harvest.

The siblings clarify by what they pour and how. The wet burrito sits in the same general family of sauce-on-burrito plates but uses a single Tex-Mex enchilada-style red, applied as a casserole-style smother under broiled cheese; the Christmas plate keeps two named chile sauces visible and discrete on the same plate. A burrito covered in only red is a red chile burrito; in only green, a green chile burrito; both of these are New Mexican standards in their own right. The chile-on-a-cheeseburger known statewide as the green chile cheeseburger is the same sauce on a different bread. The Christmas designation is portable: a plate of huevos rancheros, a chile relleno, a stack of enchiladas, all admit the same split-sauce request, and the waitress asks the question regardless of what is being ordered. What the burrito version locks in is the cylinder under the sauces.

A Hatch harvest and a 1999 state question

The dish belongs to a much wider New Mexican chile tradition rather than a single inventor's invention. The agricultural foundation is the southern New Mexico chile cultivar work begun at the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (now New Mexico State University) by Fabián García in the early twentieth century; García's standardisation of the local Pueblo and northern Mexican landrace chiles into the New Mexico No. 9 cultivar in 1921, the foundation of the modern Hatch chile family, is the closest the chile tradition has to a dated, named scientific milestone. The Mesilla Valley around the village of Hatch in Doña Ana County established itself as the centre of New Mexican commercial chile production through the mid-twentieth century, and the annual late-summer Hatch Chile Festival has run since 1971.

The Christmas designation itself is a folk usage. The standing red or green? question at a New Mexican restaurant counter is recorded in New Mexican food writing in both English and Spanish from the 1950s on and was made legal text by the New Mexico Legislature in House Joint Memorial 14 of the 1999 session, which named Red or green? the official state question. The third standing answer Christmas appears in restaurant transcripts and food writing through the 1980s and 1990s and is recognised statewide by the time of the 1999 legislative action.

At a New Mexican family restaurant on Central Avenue in Albuquerque at lunch on any working day a waitress is asking the same question over the menu, and a regular is answering the same way. The official state question was set into statute by House Joint Memorial 14 of the 1999 New Mexico Legislature.