Producers keep Santa Fe swimming in tamales
For those who love to eat — but not make — tamales for the holidays, you’re in luck
Atamale is not necessarily selfexplanatory. For those who grew up with them, it’s a no-brainer to eat a tamale — you peel the outer husk and devour the soft contents within. But for newcomers, figuring out how to eat a tamale can be counterintuitive.
Tamales are a Mesoamerican creation, a kind of dumpling made of corn masa (a starchy, soft dough) and filled with a wide variety of ingredients. The word comes from nixtamal, corn soaked and softened in lime that serves as the primary starch for Mesoamerican cuisine. While Mesoamerican tamales are often wrapped in banana leaves, the Northern New Mexican version is very specific: corn masa stuffed with chile and (usually) meat and wrapped in a corn husk. There’s the tricky part — I have a friend who, upon moving here, was handed a tamale and, after consuming it without unwrapping it, commented that it was delicious, but would have been better without the chewy outer shell.
This probably happened at Christmas, because in Northern New Mexico, tamales begin multiplying like rabbits around the holidays. Making, serving, gifting and eating tamales is a quintessentially norteño yuletide activity, not least because tamales are an ideal way to serve the waves of guests coming in and out of your house.
For some people, spending hours upon hours making tamales for holiday parties and loved ones is a treasured group bonding activity. Others of us envy those people — but we still want tamales. It’s likely that during Christmas, if you party hop, you’ll eat tamales from one or two of Santa Fe’s most prolific family-owned tamale shops over and over throughout the night.
Posa’s El Merendero has been in business since 1955, doing tamales since the beginning.
“My grandmother started making her tamales and selling them on plates and by the dozen,” says company President Jeff Posa. “We were supplying all the restaurants in Northern New Mexico with our tamales.”
At the moment, you can only buy Posa’s tamales from Posa’s itself, which people do in staggering volume over the holidays.
“Christmas is our biggest month,” Posa says. “We’re producing about 300 to 500 dozen a day. For the holidays, we have to increase that to 600 to 700 dozen a day.”
Santa Fe’s other tamale family is the Atencios of El Parasol/El Paragua restaurants, who began selling tamales and tacos in 1958. Before that, tamales were a family tradition for the Atencios.
“The recipe is actually my grandmother’s, my mom’s mom,” says co-owner Ralph Atencio. “My mom would make tamales and take them as gifts back in the day. … We’d go with her to make tamales and visit family and friends, and that was part of the Christmas tradition. … Then we started making them to sell throughout the year. We added them to the menu probably in the sixties.”
El Parasol has three locations, all of which churn out tamales in droves.
“We start gearing up for Christmas in September,” Atencio says. “Each location does quite a bit, well over a thousand.”
All these tamales are a labor of love. Both Posa’s and El Parasol make every tamale by hand.
“At one time, we thought we were going to start making them by machine, and we brought in a machine. It was a sausage extruder made into a tamale extruder, but our customers called us on it and they didn’t like them, so we went back to making them by hand,” Posa says.
In Northern New Mexico, tamale fillings come in only a few permutations: red chile and pork, green chile and chicken, and then either vegetarian cheese and green chile (at Posa’s) or vegan calabacita (at Posa’s and El Parasol). All of Posa’s tamales are precooked and then frozen, and need only about 15 minutes in the steamer to reheat. El Parasol sells both precooked tamales and frozen uncooked tamales (for $4 less per dozen).
“In both cases, you just steam them
to reheat them,” Atencio says. “To cook [the uncooked ones], steam them for an hour, to an hour and 15 minutes. What we usually do is stand them on end with the opening to the top. You fit more in your steamer and they cook more evenly. And then you let them sit for about 20 minutes so that the masa stiffens up a bit.”
Posa’s also offers cocktail-size tamales for finger-food parties that are half the size of normal tamales, roughly 2 ounces each.
“I think they taste a little bit better because they’re so small,” laughs Posa. “I don’t know why. Man, you can down six of those easily.”
At Posa’s, tamales are $24.95 a dozen for the big ones and $25.50 for two dozen of the smaller ones. El Parasol’s are $29 a dozen if cooked and $26 for a dozen frozen and uncooked. And both Posa’s and El Parasol are open Christmas Eve for your last-minute gifting or catering convenience, and while I don’t recommend it, you can come in and get your tamales that day.
“I would say about 75 percent of our sales are on the 24th; people just come in,” Posa says. “They wait in line. Christmas is not our time to go on vacation.”
“They can come in and get them on the 24th; a day or a couple of hours is
plenty of time,” Atencio says. “We’ll be ready. We gear up for the holidays.”
Tamales also make excellent gifts. Frozen, they can be shipped in a cooler overnight or second-day air.
“We’ve had a lot of customers buy them and ship them to family that live out of state,” Atencio says. “That gives people from here who live elsewhere a taste of New Mexico Christmas.” Posa’s even has a website for the purpose, www.santafetamales.com.
And while bouncing from party to party and tamale to tamale, pay attention to that husk you’re peeling — both Posa’s and El Parasol wrap their tamales in natural corn husks. This is not true of some more massproduced tamales.
“Some tamale makers don’t even use a corn husk — they use crinkled parchment paper,” Posa says. “It looks like corn husk, but it’s not.”
Hopefully, the tamale my friend ate all those years ago was not one of those. But it turns out, he was not alone in his folly.
“People who don’t know will watch and see what other people do,” Atencio says. “Some people just bite into it. A couple have eaten the husk that I’ve talked to.”
The Posas even have an (unverified) family story about this:
“My grandmother used to be the housekeeper for Sen. Joseph Montoya in the sixties and seventies, and Sen. Montoya took some tamales to Washington to John F. Kennedy,” Posa says. “JFK actually tried eating a tamale with a cornhusk on it, and Sen. Montoya had to stop him.”