But the question this begs is how have nachos infil- trated our national food life and why are they linked to football?

According to nacho lore, it all began in 1943, when several military wives at Fort Duncan in Eagle Pass, Texas, decided to go on a toot in Mexico. This did not require much pluck. Eagle Pass is just a short bridge over the Rio Grande from Piedras Negras in the state of Coahuila. In Piedras Negras (black stones, from the coal once mined there), they took shelter in the Victory Club, demanding food as well as drink. The only employee present, the maitre d', grabbed some fried corn tortilla chips from the bar, melted Wisconsin yellow cheese on top of them and then set a slice of canned jalapeño peppers on each snack.

This Escoffier of la frontera was Ignacio Anaya, nick- named Nacho. The Army brides gobbled his improvi- sation up and spread the word about the dish their leader Mamie had dubbed Nacho's especiales. Eventually people all over southern Texas were calling them nachos.

The evidence for this tale is less solid than what we might demand to prove that, say, George Washington threw a silver dollar across the Potomac. The most convincing account comes from Ignacio Anaya Jr., not a disinterested party, in an interview in the San Antonio Express-News in 2002. Long before then, the Victory Club restaurant had closed and Nacho Sr. had moved to the Moderno. He died in 1975, two years too soon to enjoy global fame.

In 1977, one Frank Liberto started selling nachos at Arlington Stadium, an early Texas Rangers venue near Dallas. Liberto made sure his nachos were on hand for sports broadcaster Howard Cosell to try when he came to town for "Monday Night Football." Cosell talked up nachos on the air, and the rest is history, the history of a planetary pandemic.

The "original" Liberto nacho was a convenience food with an ever-soft cheesoid topping poured over commercial tortilla chips. In the more than 40 countries where some version of pre-fab nacho sauces are now sold, local taste and ingenuity have transformed a spontaneous Mexican invention into a chameleon-like dish that makes your typical neighborhood garbage pizza seem as pure as a holy wafer.