Edith Lyle
MEXICAN TAMALES
Boil three pounds chicken slowly until tender, in sufficient water to cover. Season with salt when partly done.
Open six large red chilis, wash and remove seeds.
Cover with boiling water until soft, and press through sieve.
Put two tablespoons olive oil in frying pan, add two onions (chopped fine), stir until onions are slightly browned, add chili pulp and one-half cup chicken broth; cover the pan closely and cook slowly fifteen minutes. One quart of yellow corn meal (in bowl), add enough chicken broth to make a dryish paste, work it with the hand until it becomes soft but not wet. Have ready corn husks, which must be soaked and pliable.
The husks must be wide. Place layer of corn meal on husk, then layer of chicken mixture; roll and tie at both ends. Place chicken bones back into broth, place tamales over top of bones, taking care that they do not touch the water. Sprinkle with teaspoon salt, cover the boiler, and cook continuously for one hour. See that water does not boil over the tamales during this time. Serve hot.
Mother is French and a gifted cook. I am studying the art with her when our cook allows us in the kitchen.
Edith Lyle
A stage performer's version of a Southwestern staple, written for a cook who already knew what a tamale looked like. Two things need attention before you start: the corn and the fat.
- Cornmeal is not masaAuthentic tamal dough is made from nixtamalized corn — masa harina, corn treated with lime, which gives the tender, cohesive texture and the distinct aroma. A quart of plain yellow cornmeal, as written here, produces a grainy, crumbly dough that tends to fall apart when unwrapped. Substitute masa harina by volume and hydrate it with warm broth.
- The dough has no fatTraditional tamal dough is beaten with lard or shortening until light, which is what makes it fluffy rather than dense. Working cornmeal and broth to "a dryish paste" with the hand will give you something closer to a firm polenta. Beating in about a cup of lard per quart of masa brings it in line with modern practice.
- Which chilis"Six large red chilis" that are opened, seeded, softened in boiling water and pushed through a sieve are dried chilis, not fresh — most likely New Mexico or California pods. Guajillos work well and are widely sold. They are mild; the heat in this dish is meant to be gentle.
- Sieve or blenderPressing softened chilis through a sieve is the 1916 method for getting pulp without skins. A blender does it in seconds; strain once afterward to catch any remaining bits of skin.
- The bone trick is a steamer rackReturning the bones to the broth and stacking the tamales on top of them, clear of the water, is an improvised steaming platform. Any steamer insert or a folded rack does the same job. The point is that tamales steam — they must never sit in liquid, or the dough waterlogs.
- "The boiler"A large lidded stockpot, not a double boiler. Keep it at a steady simmer for the full hour and check the water level at the halfway mark, since a quart of dough makes a tall stack that can boil dry or boil over.
- HusksDried corn husks need 30 minutes to an hour in hot water until fully pliable. Tearing narrow husks into ties, or using kitchen string, is easier than hunting for the wide husks the recipe insists on.
- Yield and donenessA quart of dough with three pounds of chicken makes roughly 20 to 24 tamales — a party quantity. They are done when a test tamale peels cleanly away from the husk; if the dough sticks, steam another 15 minutes.
- Make-aheadTamales reheat by steaming better than almost anything else in this book, and freeze well wrapped. This is a recipe designed around an afternoon of assembly for several meals.
This comes from a 1916 collection of recipes contributed by working stage performers, a genre of charity and novelty cookbook that flourished when a theatrical name on a page sold copies. Tamales — the word descends from the Nahuatl tamalli — had been eaten in Mexico for millennia, and reached Anglo-American cookbooks chiefly through California and the Southwest, where tamale vendors and "tamale wagons" were fixtures of city streets by the 1890s. That route explains the recipe's compromises: cornmeal in place of masa, no lard in the dough, dried chilis treated as an ordinary pantry item. The little note about a French mother and a cook who only sometimes permits the family into her own kitchen says as much about the period as the recipe does — a young performer learning to cook as an accomplishment rather than a duty, in a household where someone else did the actual work.