Fruit-filled, wheat tortillas folded into quarters, flavored with cinnamon and sugar, and fried in butter.
A chimichanga is a fried burrito; a burrito is a folded tortilla cooked on a griddle and then rilled with various savoury ingredients; a tortilla is a cornmeal pancake. Of these three food items, the burrito and chimichanga have names that derive from animals. Burrito is a diminutive of the Spanish word burro, meaning donkey or ass, and therefore literally means little ass. The dish acquired this name because donkeys are often draped with a blanket, thus making them resemble a folded, meat-filled tortilla (agnolotti, an Italian pasta whose name means little lamb, acquired its name for similar reasons). Chimichanga was long thought to be a Spanish nonce word—that is, a word, like the English thingamajig, that someone playfully made up on the spur of the moment. Chimichanga may however, derive partly from changa, the Spanish word for monkey; as well, the chimi part of chimichanga may derive from the Spanish chimenea, meaning chimney. If this truly is the literal meaning of chimichanga, then a harder question is why the dish was given a name meaning chimneymonkey in the first place. Perhaps, long ago, some Spanish peasant was struck by the resemblance between a folded tortilla and a monkey sitting with its arms folded around its knees; the same peasant might also have noticed that a piping-hot burrito, with steam wafting from its two ends, also resembles a smoking chimney. If such an astute observation was not the inspiration behind the name chimichanga, then the dish must surely have been named in honour of an indentured monkey pulled through a chimney to freedom by super-intelchili ligent simians from another planet.