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Tamale Pie En Casserole
1 cup yellow corn-meal 6 cups boiling water 1 teaspoon salt 1 medium-sized onion 2 tablespoons fat 2 cups chopped beef 2 cups tomatoes 2 pimientos Cayenne Cook corn-meal, water, and salt, as for mush, for about thirty minutes. Chop onion and fry in fat till brown. Add meat and fry until red color disappears. Add tomatoes, pimientos, and cayenne. Line oiled casserole with mush, put meat mixture in center, cover with mush, and bake in a moderate oven (350 degrees F.; 2-2 1/2 hrs.).
A 1930s magazine-kitchen version of tamale pie: a cornmeal mush crust standing in for the corn husk and masa of a real tamale. Most of the work is in getting the mush stiff enough to hold a wall.
- The hinge: mush consistencyOne cup of cornmeal to six cups of water is a loose ratio, and thirty minutes over direct heat may not reduce it enough to spread. Cook until a spoon drawn through leaves a track that holds, adding time rather than more meal, then let it cool a few minutes before lining the dish — warm mush spreads, hot mush slumps.
- "Casserole"Here it does mean the baking dish, a deep earthenware or glass vessel. With the mush from six cups of water plus the filling, allow a dish of about 3 quarts; oil it well, as cornmeal sticks hard.
- Chopped beefThis most likely means ground beef, roughly 1 lb for two cups. The instruction to fry "until red color disappears" means the meat is no longer raw, not that it is deeply browned.
- Tomatoes and pimientosTwo cups of tomatoes in a recipe of this period would usually mean canned tomatoes with their juice. Pimientos are the canned sweet red peppers sold in small jars; two whole ones, drained and chopped, or about a third of a cup.
- Filling moistureTwo cups of canned tomatoes will leave the filling wet. Simmer the meat mixture down for ten or fifteen minutes before it goes into the dish, or the mush crust will absorb liquid and turn to paste.
- Oven and timeA moderate oven is 350F, as the recipe states. The 2 to 2 1/2 hours is long for this quantity; with a hot filling in modern bakeware, 45 to 60 minutes should be enough to set the crust and brown the top.
- SeasoningCayenne is the only spice given, and the dish is flat without more. Ground cumin, oregano and chili powder are consistent with what other American recipes of the same decade used.
- YieldSix generous servings. It cuts cleanly only after resting 15 minutes out of the oven.
Tamale pie is an American invention rather than a Mexican one — a home-economics translation of the tamale, which begins appearing in United States cookbooks and women's magazines around the 1910s. The appeal was structural: instead of spreading masa on husks one at a time, the cook lines a single dish with cornmeal mush and bakes it, which fit the era's enthusiasm for the casserole as a labor-saving, one-dish supper. Its place in a chapter called "Casserole and Oven Cookery" says as much about the period as the recipe does; the Delineator was a Butterick magazine, selling efficiency to households running with less hired help than a generation before. The cayenne-and-pimiento seasoning, mild by any Mexican standard, marks it as food written for a national readership assumed to be wary of chile.