What Is the Difference Between a Taco, a Burrito, and a Quesadilla?

Which Clue Best Separates a Taco, a Burrito, and a Quesadilla?

Start with the taco. Wikipedia describes it as a traditional Mexican dish: a small, hand-sized tortilla, made of corn or wheat, with a filling, folded over and eaten by hand [1]. A burrito is usually bigger. In its modern form it is a wheat-flour tortilla wrapped around its filling into a sealed cylinder, with the ends closed [2]. A quesadilla is a tortilla folded in half, or two tortillas, with cheese and sometimes other fillings, cooked on a griddle or stove [3].

So the useful question is not “what is it made of?” but “what was done to it?” Fold, roll, or fill and heat. A taco can be made with corn or with wheat tortillas [1], so the dough is not the dividing line.

That clue is a good start, but it comes mostly from English-language descriptions and from how the dishes are often served today. The next sections show where it bends, beginning with the name that surprises people most.

Why Is a Burrito Called a “Little Donkey,” and Was It Once a Taco?

Burrito is Spanish for “little donkey”: burro is a donkey, and the ending makes it small [2]. No one knows for sure why the food got that name. According to Wikipedia, an often repeated story says a man named Juan Méndez sold large tacos from a street stand in Ciudad Juárez during the Mexican Revolution (1910–1921), carrying them on a donkey, but the page calls this folk history [2]. Treat it as a story people like to tell, not as a record.

What is better documented is older. A Mexican dictionary of 1895, Diccionario de Mejicanismos, defines burrito as a rolled tortilla with meat or something else inside, and, according to Wikipedia, it identifies this as the name used in Guanajuato for what is called a taco elsewhere [2]. The same page says burrito was a regional name in several states for what people in and around Mexico City call a taco. Wikipedia presents this as a result of Mexico City’s influential food culture: taco became the default word, and the old meaning of burrito faded [2].

The sealed, wheat-flour burrito is what many people now think of, and it is associated with Ciudad Juárez in the northern state of Chihuahua [2]. Yet in central and southern Mexico, the same kind of wheat-tortilla wrap is still called a taco de harina, a “wheat-flour taco” [2]. So the fold-versus-roll rule is partly a recent habit, and it depends on where you stand in Mexico.

Why Does a Quesadilla in Mexico City Sometimes Have No Cheese?

The word quesadilla comes from queso (cheese). Mexico News Daily explains that it comes from the Spanish word quesada, a cheese pastry, with -illa marking something small. So the original sense was roughly a small cheesecake, and the ending has nothing to do with tortilla [4].

With a name like that, cheese seems required. Yet a reporter for the radio program The World found that in Mexico City you have to ask if you want cheese. Cooks there fill quesadillas with squash blossoms, mushrooms or sliced peppers, and cheese is often an afterthought. A man from Sonora, in the north, said that in other parts of Mexico people laugh about this, but that it is Mexico City’s own culture [5]. The article contrasts this with the rest of the country, where a quesadilla comes with cheese by default [5].

Is this a mistake? Mexico News Daily says the Royal Spanish Academy, which publishes a widely used Spanish dictionary, defines the Mexican quesadilla as a corn tortilla with cheese “or other ingredients,” that many people disagree, and that a 2016 petition asking for cheese to be required gathered only 81 votes. A language historian it cites calls the change a shift in meaning, and a linguist says the word has become a general term for a bent tortilla with a filling [4]. That article does not say when the change happened, and I could not find a reliable date.

Names also move with the filling. Two wheat tortillas with ham and cheese are often called a sincronizada instead, and the same thing with pork or beef is called a gringa in northern and western Mexico [4]. So the quesadilla’s rule of thumb, “filled and heated,” holds, but the cheese does not always come with it.

Does Corn or Wheat Dough Change a Dish’s Name?

No. Tacos come in corn and wheat versions [1], and quesadillas are made with wheat tortillas in northern Mexico and traditionally with corn in the center and south [3]. The dough tells you something about the region, not the name of the dish.

Corn is the older foundation. UNESCO, which added traditional Mexican cuisine to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2010, describes a food system built on corn, beans and chili, with corn tortillas and tamales part of everyday meals and of Day of the Dead offerings. It also describes nixtamalization, a process of soaking and cooking corn with lime that raises its nutritional value [6]. So a wheat-flour burrito is one branch of a very large tortilla family, not the whole tree.

One more case of the same looseness: the crunchy, U-shaped hard-shell taco developed in the United States. Wikipedia reports that the first patents for hard-shell taco cooking tools were filed in the 1940s [1]. It is still a folded tortilla with a filling, which is why it keeps the name taco.

How Can You Test the Names Yourself on a Menu?

• Take a sheet of paper. Fold it in half: that is the taco motion. Roll it up: that is the burrito motion. Place a small paper “filling” between two sheets: that is the quesadilla motion. Use paper, not food, for this.
• Next time you look at a menu with an adult, compare two burritos or two quesadillas from different places. Do the size, the fillings and the cooking differ? That difference is the looseness of names in action.
• Look up the story of where the word taco comes from. One theory ties it to a word for the paper-wrapped “plugs” of gunpowder that Mexican silver miners used, but Wikipedia calls this only one theory and says explanations of the food word are generally theoretical [1]. What kind of evidence might help researchers decide?

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