An enchilada is a type of Mexican food but the word has expanded beyond the world of gastronomy.

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The whole enchilada means “everything” like the whole ball of wax.

The big enchilada means the “kingpin,” the “big cheese.”

This is quite a responsibility for a meal whose name really means “seasoned with chilies.”

The first citation that The Oxford English Dictionary has for enchilada dates to 1887.  This particular entry has not yet been updated from the second edition of the OED and so it doesn’t yet have first citations for the usage in the big enchilada or the whole enchilada, but luckily we have Richard Nixon that noted lexicographer.

Well, perhaps not a lexicographer, but certainly an avid recorder of history because it is from one of his Watergate tapes that we get the earliest use that we know of for the phrase the big enchilada.

William Safire notes in his Political Dictionary the use of big enchilada as being recorded on the tape of March 27, 1973 when John Ehrlichman used the neologism to refer to John Mitchell, the highest official that the media had at that point identified as being involved in Watergate.

I found two interesting things further back in etymological history, both from that first enchilada citation. That first citation comes from a book called Face to Face with the Mexicans by Fanny Chambers Gooch Iglehart.

The subtitle reads the domestic life, educational, social and business ways, statesmanship and literature, legendary and general history of the Mexican people, as seen and studied by an American woman during seven years of intercourse with them.

The passage that mentions enchiladas is a description of a sort of courtship and unofficial wedding supposedly typical of your average lower class Mexican.  Fanny describes no ceremony except that the man drapes his shawl around the woman’s shoulders and takes her off to a cheap enchilada and tamale stand.

Fanny is sure to tell us also that the honeymoon is invariably short and typically ends with domestic strife and infidelity.

A bit of a generalization I’d think.

But Fanny does also mention the drink consumed by the wedding couple; it’s pulque.

Pulque is a fermented drink usually made from the sap of agave which is a kind of cactus-like plant family who’s best known member is aloe.

Sounds delicious, especially when you learn that the meaning of pulque is “rotten” or “decomposed” from the Nahuatl language.

The fact is that this drink goes off mighty fast and some attribute the “rotten” meaning to this.

But others think that the Spanish explorers, whose discovery of the stuff brought the word to English as early as 1572, misunderstood the Nahuatl name.  In Nahuatl the stuff was called octli which meant “alcoholic drink” but it is supposed that by a day or two later it was being called octli puliuhki meaning “the alcoholic drink that’s gone bad” and that’s what the Spanish picked up on.