From the most casual diners to bistros at fashion’s cutting edge, if a New Mexico restaurant purports to serve native foods, sopaipillas will be part of its repertoire. They might not be listed on the menu, because they are taken for granted, usually occupying a basket that would elsewhere hold dinner rolls. Significantly lighter than the substantial discs known as Navajo fry bread in the Southwest, a sopaipilla is a buoyant pocket of dough puffed up by quick cooking in boiling lard, its surface slightly crisp, its interior heat-stretched to become more air than pastry. A sopaipilla must be served fresh and still warm. It is finger food, easy to tear and use for mopping chile from a plate of carne adovada or eggs from huevos rancheros. Its only condiment is honey, which can be drizzled on, bite by bite.
Sopaipillas are served at breakfast, lunch, and dinner in New Mexico.
Clearly it is on the same family tree as the Utah scone, and it is arguably a distant relative of the beignet and of fried dough. But its exact lineage puzzles even the experts. A while ago, when we were dining at the venerable La Posta restaurant in Mesilla, we enjoyed a sopaipilla colloquy with Dr. Paul Bosland of New Mexico State University’s Chile Pepper Institute, and proprietor Jerean Hutchinson, whose grandmother founded the restaurant in 1939, and neither could say with certainty which of the several cultural streams that flow into New Mexican cookery brought them or how they got named. “Sopa means ‘pillow,’ so sopaipilla is a ‘little pillow,’” Dr. Bosland said. “But there is no word sopaipilla in Spanish.” Ms. Hutchinson added, “I suspect they are Native American . . . and that maybe Spanish settlers took credit for them!”
Elaborations include stuffed sopaipillas (with chili, carne seca, or refried beans) and dessert sopaipillas topped with ice cream and fruit or sauce.