Although frijoles is the Spanish word for beans, in the United States frijoles is sometimes used to refer to a particular type of bean-based dish, one which is commonly eaten as a dip with corn tortilla chips, served as a side dish in Mexican restaurants, and used in the preparation of other Mexican foods (such as tostadas and chimichangas). That dish is typically prepared by cooking beans in a manner that infuses them with moisture (e.g., simmering, stewing, or pressure cooking them, possibly soaking them in water overnight first), mashing them into a paste, and frying them with lard.

The standard English-language name for this culinary concoction is “refried beans,” a term that has given many people (myself included) pause to ponder the question: “Why would beans need to be fried more than once?” The answer is that the beans in “refried beans” aren’t really fried multiple times; the English name came about through a mistranslation from Spanish.

The dish we English speakers know as refried beans is called frijoles refritos in Spanish: frijole being the Spanish word for “bean,” and “frito” being a Spanish adjective meaning “fried.” The translation error came about through the mistaken assumption that the prefix re- means in the same thing in Spanish as it does in English. Although placing re- before an English verb is a common way of indicating an action undertaken more than once (e.g., reschedule, reassign, redistribute), in Spanish that prefix is sometimes used as a form of emphasis. Therefore frijoles refritos are not beans that have been fried multiple times, but rather beans that have been well-fried, as Diana Kennedy explained in The Cuisines of Mexico: