Dipping Into Cheesy History

As usual, I had more good material than would fit, so I had to cut out this nugget about how RoTel dip first started to ooze out of Texas and into the rest of the country. It's the first recipe I've been able to find that explicitly calls for RoTel and Velveeta together by name. Those folks in Pittsburgh must have been taken aback.

Ro-Tel Initially just sold in the Texas market and didn’t expand into Oklahoma and Arkansas until the 1950s, but word about their queso innovation soon began leaking out.

In 1958 the Pittsburgh Press ran a story on their food pages about Samma Harper, a popular local dinner party host. Before moving to Pittsburgh, her family spent several years in Rockdale, Texas, where her husband, John, was helping Alcoa open an aluminum plant. Mrs. Harper drew upon this experience to wow her Steel City friends with an exotic “Mexican Dinner” themed parties. The menu included tamales, enchiladas, and frijoles, with an appetizer of “Rotel cheese dip with fritos.”

The recipe will sound familiar to today’s party-goers: “melt 1 lb. Velveeta cheese with 1 can Rotel tomatoes and chili.” The serving instructions might jar a bit, though: “Serve hot with potato chips.” Fritos, it seems, weren’t yet available in Pittsburgh.