Just who invented the hand-held breakfast burrito?

Nov. 27—Sitting at a table in the Saveur Bistro restaurant she runs with her husband, Bernie, Dee Rusanowski gestured to an old menu to prove her point.

There it was: the breakfast sandwich, comprising ham, eggs and cheese, that she used to make at Dee's Restaurant decades ago. The culinary concoction was offered on buns or muffins for $1.80 at one time.

Then, one day, Rusanowski said, she decided to wrap the ingredients in a tortilla. And when a young patron asked her to add some potatoes, she threw some hash browns into the mix.

And voila! The hand-held breakfast burrito was born.

"I didn't know what to call it," recalled Rusanowski, though she does know what to call herself — the inventor of the handheld breakfast burrito.

Hers is a big boast, not unlike someone claiming to have invented the hamburger or the Frito pie — iconic food dishes we all devour without giving much thought to who was the originator. But in a state where fistfights can break out over loyalty to red or green, it's a point of pride to claim a tasty piece of Northern New Mexican food history.

Rusanowski points out she's not claiming to have invented the smothered breakfast burrito, which Tia Sofia's introduced in 1975, a year before she made her discovery just blocks away at Dee's Restaurant, which she ran on Washington Avenue for 20 years before moving on to Saveur Bistro on Montezuma Street, where she's been for another 20 years.

But the hand-held breakfast burrito? She's adamant it is her invention — one made almost by accident.

Naturally, a claim like this is likely to be challenged, and it didn't take long to find those who are skeptical when informed Rusanowski is the self-proclaimed Neil Armstrong of the hand-held breakfast burrito.

"It's unlikely — but possible," Gregory McNamee, author of Tortillas, Tiswin and T-Bones: A Food History of the Southwest, wrote in an email Tuesday.

McNamee noted that, while Rusanowski may have been the first person in Santa Fe to offer hand-held breakfast burritos, the habit of eating a burrito by hand dates to at least the 19th century when the item was "carried by burros (whence the name) at worksites in Mexico as a convenient, portable meal."

"Since they were sold at all times of day and since, for obvious reasons, they wouldn't have been smothered," he wrote, suggesting the invention of hand-held breakfast burritos probably predates Rusanowski's claim.

Rusanowski acknowledges there are variations of the theme around the world, including hand-held breakfast burritos in Italy, Spain and China.

"They're very popular," she said, adding the hand-held burrito probably owes its popularity to convenience: easy to clutch and chew while you are walking, waiting for the bus, working or running late for life.

Closer to home, an online search of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office does not return any results for "hand-held breakfast burrito."

Many online sources credit the birth of the smothered breakfast burrito — close cousin to the hand-held burrito — to Tia Sophia's in '75.

For years, Nick Maryol, who runs Tia Sophia's on West San Francisco Street, said his father, James Maryol, invented the breakfast burrito. On Tuesday, Maryol said with a laugh he had to "walk that back."

He said on reflection what his father meant was New Mexicans have been putting bacon and potatoes in tortillas and eating them for breakfast for a long time. His father, he said "was merely the first person to call it a breakfast burrito and put it on the menu in 1975."

Nick Maryol's mother, Ann, who opened the restaurant with her husband, said her husband used to talk about how, as a child growing up in Albuquerque, his friends would wrap their favorite Southwestern foods into a tortilla, roll it up and chow down.

Ann Maryol was describing the hand-held burrito.

"What could be simpler? You have a wonderful fresh hot tortilla, and you put something in it and munch on it as you move along," she said.

She added they offered burritos on the menu shortly after the restaurant opened. She said one day her husband added green chile and cheese to the concoction and "that's how the smothered burrito was invented."

Could Rusanowski have offered the handheld version first, at least in Santa Fe? Ann Maryol did not take the bait.

"I was too busy to eat at her restaurant, and she was too busy to eat at mine," she said.

Rusanowski says she was inspired to roll her burritos into easy-to-hold pouches after walking by Tia Sofia's one day and seeing the breakfast burrito on the menu. Though she never actually called it a breakfast burrito, it was one all the same, she said.

In fact, in 2019, the Legislature voted to make March 14 of that year Dee Day, so named after Rusanowski, as a way to acknowledge her contribution to the culinary side of Santa Fe.

The resolution notes Dee and Bernie moved to Santa Fe from Los Angeles in 1975 — it was one earthquake too many that did the trick, Dee Rusanowski said — and said "kids from that time especially remember grabbing one of Dee's doughnuts on the way to school or grabbing a brownie or hamburger or another doughnut after school or on the weekends."

It also says Dee's business was "home of the hand-held breakfast burrito, the perfect breakfast to grab and eat on the way to school."

So there, she says.

"I don't care what they say," Rusanowski said of those who may want to take credit for her achievement in this field. "Because it's true."

One small step for breakfast, one giant leap ...