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Hot Tamale Pie
2 POUNDS GROUND MEAT I 11/2 TEASPOONS SALT I TEASPOON CUMIN SEED, OR CARAWAY 1/2 CUP GROUND CHILI PEPPERS 3 TABLESPOONS CHILI POWDER I GARLIC CLOVE, CHOPPED FINE 2 POUNDS CORN MEAL (PREFERABLY WHITE) Cook meat slowly in 3 cups water with 1/2 teaspoon salt, seasonings and peppers, until thick.
Stir corn meal in boiling water with 1 teaspoon salt, to a stiff mush. Pat it out all around sides and bottom of a deep pan. Put cooked meat into pan and then pat out meal enough to lay on top as a cover for the pie, and steam 1 hour.
After filling her up with such a spicy pie even a squawman ought to get pretty good close harmony from the distaff side on a staff or two of "Down Mejico way."
A camp version of the tamale, built as one large pie rather than individual husk-wrapped parcels. The proportions here are generous and a few of the measures need translating before you start.
- ScaleTwo pounds of meat and two pounds of cornmeal make a very large pie, enough for 10-12 people. Halving the whole thing fits an ordinary Dutch oven or 9x13 pan.
- Ground chili peppersThe half cup of "ground chili peppers" most likely means dried pods ground to a powder, not fresh chiles and not the blended chili powder listed separately. Depending which pods were used the heat could be mild or considerable; either way half a cup plus three tablespoons of chili powder is a great deal of chile by current taste, so start with a quarter of that and adjust.
- Cumin or carawayCumin seed is what the dish wants. Caraway is offered as a substitute, and it pushes the flavour toward Central Europe rather than Mexico.
- Cornmeal quantityTwo pounds of cornmeal is roughly 6 cups, and a stiff mush takes about three times its volume in water. Add the water gradually and keep stirring, or you get lumps that will not smooth out.
- Meat filling"Cook until thick" means the 3 cups of water should reduce until the mixture holds its shape on a spoon. If it is still loose it will soak the crust and the pie will collapse when cut.
- SteamingAn hour of steam means covered, over gentle heat, with the lid weighted or sealed so vapour stays in. Over a campfire, a Dutch oven with a few coals on the lid does the same job; in a kitchen, a covered pan in a moderate oven with a shallow water bath is the nearest equivalent, though the recipe itself gives no oven temperature.
- Cooling before cuttingLet the pie stand 15-20 minutes off the heat. Cut hot, the cornmeal crust will not have set and the slices will slump.
- Meat choiceGround beef is the default reading, but the recipe predates lean supermarket mince. Something around 80/20 gives the fat that carries the chile.
Tamale pie was the American answer to a labour problem: real tamales mean spreading masa on dozens of soaked corn husks by hand, and the pie gets the same flavours out of one pan. Recipes for it appear in American community and church cookbooks from the early decades of the twentieth century, and it turns up often in chuckwagon and Dutch-oven collections, where a single covered pot doing all the work is exactly what the situation calls for. The chile-and-cumin seasoning suggests borrowing from Texan and Northern Mexican cooking, filtered through Anglo kitchens that measured chile by the cup of commercial powder rather than by the pod. The closing line appears to echo "South of the Border (Down Mexico Way)", a hit of 1939, which would put the writing no earlier than that, and the "squawman" joke reflects the casual racial humour common in outdoor-cooking books of the period.