¿What is a Tortilla?
A suprising history of how "tortilla" came to refer to four foods, including how a formerly enslaved Afro-Spanish conquistador brought wheat to the Americas.
You order a tortilla. What are you picturing?
In Madrid, you’ll receive an egg-based omelet, often filled with potatoes. In Mexico City, it’s almost certainly a warm, corn flatbread from the comal, perfect for tacos. In northern Mexico—or in the American supermarket—large flour wraps might come to mind first.
So how did one word, tortilla, come to embody so many distinct foods?
Etymology is our first clue. Spanish evolved from Vulgar Latin, where torta panis meant “twisted bread,” a round loaf. Torta remains in Spanish today as “dough made from flour, with other ingredients, cooked on low heat,” according to the Real Academia Española.
Tortilla is simply the diminutive of torta. Today the RAE recognizes three primary meanings:
A dish of beaten eggs, coagulated with oil in a pan, sometimes with added ingredients.
In Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile: a small, savory flat cake of wheat or corn flour, cooked in embers.
In much of Latin America: a flat torta made from corn flour, eaten plain or as a wrapper.
In medieval Castilian, torta already meant a flat, unsweetened cake; tortilla was “a little round bread.” Even today, torta in Latin America often refers to a dessert like a birthday cake.
Between 711 and 1492, Muslim rule extended across much of the Iberian Peninsula, bringing with it foods like raghīf and ruqāq, thin wheat breads folded and baked on a griddle—cousins of modern msemmen or pita. They weren’t far removed from what we know as flour tortillas.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, corn tortillas were already central to Indigenous life. In Nahuatl, tlaxcalli meant “a cooked thing,” from the verb ixca (“to cook on a comal”) plus the noun-forming suffix -lli. As writer David Bowles notes, it’s akin to English “cookie” or “biscuit”—literally “cooked thing.”
Nixtamalization—the soaking of corn in lime water—was a crucial process carried out by Indigenous people, which boosted nutrients and improved texture.
The Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún documented Indigenous foods in his General History of the Things of New Spain (16th century). He described tortillas of many kinds: white or dark, small or large, flavored with beans, or even layered like puff pastry.
Spanish eyewitnesses confirm their ubiquity:
Hernán Cortés, in his Second Letter of Relation (1520), praised Tlatelolco’s maize markets: “They sell much maize in grain and as bread, which is far superior… to that of all the other islands and mainland” (Letras y huellas del maíz, p. 18).
A decade later, royal chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo recorded “large, white, and thin tortas called tascalpachon” (p. 23), and detailed Indigenous cultivation, harvest, and cooking practices.
A generation later, Diego de Landa gave the first explicit description of nixtamalization: Indigenous women soaked maize overnight in lime and water to loosen the hull before grinding it into dough (p. 25).
Rather than adopt tlaxcalli from Nauhatl, Spaniards expanded the use of their own word: tortilla.
Accounts by Andrés de Tapia and Gil González Dávila confirm his role. Wheat and grapes were indispensable for celebrating mass, and by 1525 both were grown near Mexico City. As far as records show, Garrido might have been the only freed Black man in the colonies at the time.
Journalist Gustavo Arellano has pointed out the parallels between flour tortillas and Moorish flatbreads. In his interview with The Splendid Table.
Answering the question, “is it possible there's a link between pita or Moorish flatbreads and the flour tortilla?” he says:
There has to be - from the Levantine. And, depending on the decade, sometimes people say it's a Jewish influence. Sometimes people say it's a Moorish influence. The reality is no one really knows how flour tortillas got started in Mexico except that it was done, again, up in Northern Mexico. But here's the key about Northern Mexico. You have to imagine we're talking about the 1500s, the 1600s, where the country of Mexico is still being conquered by the Spaniards. The Spaniards are sending people off to basically subjugate tribes. A lot of the people who wanted to go to the most northern outreaches – we're talking about New Mexico, Chihuahua and all that – these are people that in Spain were already quote, unquote “mongrels.” They were undesirables. So, you're getting a lot of people who are Jews – hidden Jews, mind you, because we're still in the Inquisition – and you're also going to get Muslims as well, the Moros. They're going up there and they're going to use whatever they can to be able to recreate not just the foods of the quote, unquote “Spaniards,” but also their native cuisine.
As flour tortillas spread, they echoed both the Moorish flatbreads long called tortillas in Spain and the Indigenous tlaxcalli of corn.
Back in Spain, egg-based tortillas predate the conquest. In 1423, Enrique de Villena mentioned “eggs fried up in tortilla form.” [Original text].
By 1611, Francisco Martínez Montiño, cook to Philip III and IV, included tortilla recipes in his Arte de cozina, pastelería, vizcochería y conservería.
Potatoes arrived in Spain by the 1570s, as Hawkes & Francisco-Ortega document in The Potato in Spain during the Late 16th Century (1992). By 1767, Joseph Antonio Valcárcel recorded their use in tortillas (Agricultura General y Gobierno de la casa de campo). Today, tortilla in Spain, when not qualified with other words, usually refers to the staple potato omelet. If you need to clarify, you can say “tortilla española” or “tortilla de patatas”.
Today, a plain omelet in Spain is a tortilla francesa. The term, according to some sources, dates to the Napoleonic Wars: when potatoes were scarce during the sieges, people made egg-only omelets and ironically called them “French” tortillas.
From Sahagún’s descriptions of tlaxcalli to Garrido’s wheat fields and the siege-born tortilla francesa, the tortilla has traveled across languages and continents. The word has seemingly always referred to multiple foods.
So…what will be the next tortilla?