The Tamale: A Tasting
My family were farmers. They ate a lot of weird country shit, some of it delicious. Okra, lima beans, crawfish that we’d chase in ditches when I was a kid, fried catfish, ripe tomato sandwiches on white bread with a liberal application of pepper. But none of these things (even fried chicken from the rec room of the First Baptist church, an item which was on my “death row last meal top 5 list” for over a decade) capture my enduring imagination like the tamale. City food I guess, sold in push carts on the streets of Vicksburg by older African American men, and in restaurants like Solly’s or The Tamale Place. These were the tamales of my childhood, only eaten when visiting my mother’s family.
For a couple of summers my parents stayed in England and shipped me to Vicksburg, to work on the farm with my cousins. Those years I drove to town on my own and got tamales, even though I didn’t have a driver’s license. Didn’t seem to be a problem, only got pulled over once, and my grandaddy talked us out of a ticket. We were going too slow on the highway, which only happened because he was in the car: Grandaddy was an infamous five-under the speed limit slow driver. Meandering. Restless on the passenger side, in those years I often pondered if he really wanted to get to where we were going. I think he enjoyed the spaces in between. He was an older man working two full-time jobs, struggling to save a farm while unloading boats at the port at night. A trip to the chainsaw repair shop can feel like a vacation when you’re on that schedule.
If he was in the vehicle we were likely heading to Wendy’s. He liked the baked potato bar for some reason. Maybe it was the chili, I don’t know. I wanted a bacon cheeseburger. Anyway, if I was unaccompanied, cruising around at a teenage speed in his blue Ford F-150 (or in later years, his little sky blue Volkswagen pick-up with beige spots where I’d covered rust in Bond-o) I’d be predisposed to stop for a tamale. I was always starving, suddenly over six feet tall, skinny, and doing agricultural labor in a subtropical blanket of humidity.
Those years I ate tamales, drove too fast, and didn’t think much about either thing. Started smoking, too. Wandered around in a haze of anonymous unaccompanied freedom. Food was less on my mind than the strange rituals of my people that I’d been dropped into with little notice or preparation. A mix of contemporary country and hair metal, mud pulls and church socials. I was adrift, uncomprehending. I enjoyed myself, but I was absolutely a foreigner.
Surprise! I’m not Mexican. And neither are these tamales. I do have a Latin American Studies degree, which gifted me a deep appreciation for the literature of central and south America, but imparted no insight surrounding the Mississippi tamale. Thanks to folklorist, friend, and fellow ex-Mississippian April McGreger, I do have some inkling of how the tamale ended up in wonderfully mutated form on the streets of Vicksburg. I know scholarly research has been done on the topic: I’d suggest asking Marcie or Bill Ferris (a Vicksburg native) for the straight story. I bet they have an understanding of the migration and metamorphosis of my deepest-rooted food craving. In this little fake essay, I’ll stick to anecdote and conjecture.
As a kid I lived in Riverside, CA for a few years, but the Mexcian food I remember was Taco Bell, not authentic tamales. Midway through undergrad at UNC I stopped going to Mississippi. Thirteen hours is a long drive, and my feelings about the place were mixed. Tamales were gone from my life for a decade. My attention shifted to fancy French and eventually Italian food to pair with my burgeoning wine gig. I wanted estimable matches for Poulsard and Frappato, and felt behind, pressed for time. The cuisine of a faraway place supplanted my interest in the foods of my roots. Anyhow I’d been a military kid, rootless in a way, though very much formed by Florida and Mississippi and the other places claimed by my family. Too many roots, maybe, or at least a lot of identity to contend with.
Road life aided my rediscovery of the tamale. At life’s midpoint I left cloistered years of wine retail behind, and set out to sell my very own imported Italian wine across the state, with little practical support (at first) and very few free minutes to eat. Meals had to be eaten over the steering wheel. Salad was no longer an option. Enter the tamale. Different than what I remembered, available in a surprising diversity of locations: gas stations, taquerias, tienditas of the kind that mostly sell money orders and shelf-stable grocery items. Taco trucks parked near construction sites. I grabbed tamales by the handful. Some were mediocre, most of them I loved, all of them were a very economically viable way to get the calories I needed to bounce back-and-forth from Kinston to Asheville several times per week.
I love food in nature’s own wrapper. Don’t get me started on glutinous rice in banana leaves.
I made several successful batches at home. Steamed in my hardworking pasta pot: makes enough for a party! With tamales it’s as easy to make 30 as it is to make a handful, and simple fillings like carnitas aren’t substantially different in preparation method from N.C. 's venerated (overrated?) pork-based cuisine. Did you buy too big a shoulder for that family get-together? Why not riff a bit: turn that barbecue into tamales! Saucy recipes abound.
I have favorites now. We are going to profile them, and throw out some tasting notes. Wine matches are included, some from our portfolio, others simply what I’d drink if I were you, outside of my role as head fancy wine man at PWI.
Our tamales:
Vicksburg street tamales - First, the size. They are small. Snack size, like you could get up a head of steam and end up eating a half dozen. Next, the filling. Imagine the hardshell taco beef of your wildest dreams and you’ll be in the vicinity. Super-spicy beef, sometimes pork. I’m convinced Caparsa rosso is the ideal wine for these primally satisfying snacks. I crave them with the distance of memory (and the distance of distance) adding urgency to my obsession.
2. Tamaleria y Tortilleria Molina (Asheville, NC) - really nice texture to the masa. The filling is chicken and it is good, but the whole thing really gets going with the addition of salsa roja with nice smoky depth of flavor. Tenuta degli Ultimi Sanguefreddo is a fruity and refreshing counterpoint to the spice.
3. La Vaquita (Durham, NC) - These are the portliest tamales I’ve seen. They are double-wides, almost as broad as they are long. And they bring the heat! My kid wants to love them, but I can see a little sweat on her brow once we get halfway done. A good, distinct take on this often standardized foodstuff. Wine is fine, but a 12-pack of Modelo from the BP station makes a lot more sense.
4. Highway 98 tamales - There’s a place in a strip mall near Charles Neal middle school on the way to Wake Forest, in that expanse of technically-still-Durham that stretches out to the northeast for miles and miles. It’s a tienda really, a couple doors down from the now permanently closed El Coyote Mexican restaurant. They have a hot bar with chicken and a bunch of other Mexican staples that I think caters mostly to a working lunch crowd. There are a lot of places like this one in our midst. Sometimes the tamales are perfect, so good that I dragged a bewildered Matteo Garberoglio from Carussin winery out there to eat hot tamales in the parking lot, standing next to an ATM machine in the most un-Italian lunch set up imaginable. Drink a liter of the Carussin Completo vino rosso with a pile of these brilliantly archetypal tamales and you will transcend to a higher plane of culinary existence, a multi-dimensional utopia where flavor is all there is, convention doesn’t matter, food bloggers, status symbols, influencers, celebrity chefs and publicists maybe never existed, and calories are only your friend. All there is: perfect flavor and happiness.
5. I made some tamales at home. I feel lucky to live in a town where fresh masa is easily acquired, along with the other half-dozen ingredients on my tamale shipping list. I can buy pork shoulder clearly labeled carne para tamales from a latino butcher, ancho and arbol chiles by the fistful, for a pittance. Friend and pie goddess Phoebe Lawless provided lard rendered on Tuesday for my Saturday assembly line, courtesy of a local butcher who specializes in pastured animals.
You can probably make tamales in one day, but I took two. Saturday I acquired everything, and cooked the pork filling. Sunday morning I toasted the chiles, made a mole, combined the masa fresca with the lard, and then constructed 65-70 tamales. I went until I ran out of corn husks. It was fun, meditative, the house was empty (maybe because of the chile spice in the air) so I could listen to all my favorite “acquired taste'' music without fear of frowns. The tamales turned out small but satisfying. The chunky, spicy pork became muted when shrouded in fresh, fatty masa. Straight from the pot, steaming and shit-hot, they were delicious. I felt a little giddy from seeing the process to a positive conclusion. They needed a drizzle of mole to come to life. But as an amatuer, I take the absence of epic failure as success. I made edible tamales! And had a great time doing it.
Postscript- Beer is so good with tamales, but don’t rule out low alcohol reds with your next batch. The Costadila 2-liter that Dressner imports is a 10.5%abv party bottle that just makes sense with a food that you prepare by the dozen. Nicolini Piccola Nera (chilled, in magnum) is a smart move for the same reasons. And there are always 5-liter bag-in-boxes of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo from Centorame.