chile con queso

English

A bowl of chile con queso served with tortilla chips as an appetizer in a Tex-Mex restaurant

Alternative forms

• chili con queso

Etymology

From Spanish chile con queso (“chili with cheese”).

Noun

chile con queso (uncountable)

1. A creamy sauce used as a dip, made from melted cheese and chili peppers.
   • 1984, Chet Flippo, David Bowie’s Serious Moonlight: The World Tour, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., →ISBN, page 148:

     Big Tony, who had been quietly puffing on his cigarillo at the door—no intruders here!—takes delivery of an impressive three-foot-high spray of flowers and very carefully walks over and deposits it square in the middle of a steam table, right in the rickety middle of hissing bowls of chile con queso and ominous-looking picante sauce.

   • 2003, David Baird, Edie Jarolim, Don Laine, Barb Laine, Eric Peterson, Neil E. Schlecht, Texas (Frommer’s), 2nd edition, New York, N.Y.: Wiley Publishing, Inc., →ISBN, page 12:

     Bursting the bubble of a perfectly puffed tortilla smothered in chile con queso is the moment where anticipation meets realization in the Tex-Mex experience.

   • 2012, Alison Cook, “Why Chile con Queso Matters”, in Brett Anderson, Sara Camp Arnold, John T. Edge, editors, Cornbread Nation 6: The Best of Southern Food Writing, Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, →ISBN, page 7:

     If Tex-Mex is our state’s tribal nursery food—a truth that I hold to be self-evident—then chile con queso is our mother’s milk.

Synonyms

• queso

Related terms

• chili con carne

See also

• chili cheese

Further reading

• chile con queso on Wikipedia.Wikipedia