2374: nachos Jun 18, 2021

There's an old joke:

What do you call cheese that doesn't belong to you?

Nacho cheese. (This really only works if you say it out loud...)

For Ignacio Anaya however, this would be false. Nachos were actually named after a specific person, Ignacio Anaya, a Mexican restaurateur who owned Nacho's Restaurant and named the dish after himself too. Nacho happens to be a fairly common nicknamed form of the Spanish name Ignacio. This was originally the Latin 'Ignatius', famed for the saint Ignatius of Antioch, with Ignatius technically being a name in English but far less common than its Spanish equivalent.