Refried beans Refried beans Refried beans (Spanish: "frijoles refritos") is a dish of cooked and mashed beans and is a traditional staple of Mexican and Tex-Mex cuisine, although each cuisine has a different approach when making the dish. Refried beans are also popular in many other Latin American countries. The name is a direct calque of Spanish "frijoles refritos", "refritos" meaning "rehashed" or "reheated" in English. In this dish, after being boiled and then mashed into a paste, the beans are sometimes then fried or baked, though usually neither, thus making the term "refried" even more misleading. In northern Mexico and in
Tex-Mex U.S. side. A 1968 "Los Angeles Times" feature wrote "[i]f the dish is a combination of Old World cooking, hush-my-mouth Southern cuisine and Tex-Mex, it's from the Texas Hill Country." In France, Paris's first Tex-Mex restaurant opened in March 1983. After the 1986 release of the film "Betty Blue", Tex-Mex cuisine's popularity in Paris increased. The "Oxford English Dictionary" supplies the first-known uses in print of "Tex-Mex" in reference to food, from a 1963 article in "The New York Times Magazine", and a 1966 item in the "Great Bend" (Kansas) "Tribune". Diana Kennedy, an influential food authority, explained the distinctions