Lessons on tamales and life from Sylvia Casares
The cameras are above the stove, so as Sylvia Casares kneads the masa, everyone in class can see her hands on the TV screen above her head. It’s a high-tech way to watch tamale-making, an art that, Casares tells the class, has been around for 2,000 years — long before Christmas arrived in the Americas and tamales became regulation holiday food.
Meat inside a cornmeal dough, wrapped in cornshucks: It’s the original meal to go, she jokes, and in a biodegradable wrapper to boot.
She’s made that joke plenty of times before. After all, she’s taught these classes since 2005, and she’s frequently asked to do public demonstrations of Texas Mexican regional cooking — a tradition that she practiced at the highest level for decades before anyone bothered to distinguish it from Tex-Mex.
Tex-Mex is the more recent variety, a fusion cuisine born in restaurants to be served to Anglos. Casares isn’t hostile to the newer style: Both locations of her Sylvia’s Enchilada Kitchen offer excellent fajitas and margaritas.
But the thing that differentiates Casares’ food
is her dedication to the older styles. At the restaurant, in her classes and in her cookbook, “The Enchilada Queen,” she tirelessly advocates for the kind of food that people in South Texas and northern Mexico cooked long before a national border distinguished the two countries — dishes made with fresh chiles, white cheeses, dried beans, homemade stocks, fresh tortillas served hot off the comal.
Her restaurants serve 19 kinds of enchiladas, divided on the menu into “North” and “South” — enchiladas traditionally specific to, say, Lubbock or El Paso or Guadalajara.
She gives in to the modern world when necessary. In Brownsville, her mother and grandmother used lard in their tortillas, but at the restaurant, for the sake of vegetarians and people concerned about saturated animal fats, she uses vegetable shortening.
But tamales, she teaches in her cooking classes, are different.
For tamales, her recipe specifies lard. Usually someone asks whether you could substitute some more healthful fat in the cormeal masa — maybe olive oil?
Casares’ answer is practiced: Sure, you could try that. But it wouldn’t taste the same. Then she often quotes one of her mother’s favorite sayings: “Poquito veneno no mata.” A little poison won’t kill you.
Casares often thinks about her mother, Severa Casares — about the way that she cooked and the way she saw the world. Her mother had another saying, one usually offered as a comfort when something had gone wrong. “You aren’t the first,” her mother would say, “and you won’t be the last.”
But sometimes, the world doesn’t feel that way. As home cooking grows ever rarer — and Texas Mexican home cooking in particular — it sometimes seems that Casares is preserving a disappearing art, even teaching it to Mexican Americans who missed learning it at home.
Recently the library in Brownsville, her hometown, asked Casares to lead a tamale workshop there. Her little brother Oscar Casares, now an author and professor at the University of Texas at Austin, thought it was hilarious that they asked her to travel all the way from Houston. It was Brownsville — South Texas, right on the Mexican border, a place that time seems to have forgotten. Couldn’t they find someone in Brownsville to make tamales?
Apparently not. Lots of the students in her tamale classes are Latinas — often middle-aged, people who suddenly find themselves the matriarchs of their families but without a clue how to continue the traditions.
In the class on Monday, among the people watching Casares’ hands on the screen, was her old friend Susie Ortiz, who grew up with Casares in Brownsville but is absolutely not a cook; two of Ortiz’s daughters; and five of her granddaughters.
One of the teenage granddaughters — the one who says her dad, from Iowa, is the whitest guy on the planet — was amused by the whole concept of a tamale class. “Now we’re going to be Mexican cooks?” she asked her mom.
The answer was yes, if Casares had anything to do with it.
‘All I’d ever eaten’
At her restaurant on Woodway, Casares points out photos of her family, hanging in the private dining room. There’s her dad, on the horse he rode when he worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, patrolling the Mexican border for stray cattle. There’s her parents’ wedding
portrait, her mother only 16. There’s her grandmother Sarita.
Casares, 67, grew up eating hot lunches and dinners at home. Her mother worked as a store clerk, but even so, the family convened at lunch every day, and her mother cooked the old-fashioned way, the way that everyone in Brownsville seemed to cook. “Before I was 18,” Casares often says, “all I’d ever eaten was Mexican food.”
No one in her family formally taught Casares to cook. She learned the traditional way: by watching and absorbing, by noticing how the dough felt and how salt changed the way the chile paste tasted.
That changed when she went to UT. Planning to become a teacher, she majored in home economics, reveling in the scientific, analytic approach to squishy matters such as childrearing and cooking. But instead of becoming a teacher, she landed a better-paying job in Houston, working as a food scientist for Uncle Ben’s Rice.
She wore a white lab coat, and designed and tested the recipes that appeared on the back of rice boxes — quick, full of shortcuts and artificial ingredients.
After a decade there, she switched to sales, working for Kraft and Heinz and Sara Lee, pitching the companies’ processed products to restaurants. She was good at it. But all the other women around her, she noticed, were in their 20s and 30s; male buyers simply preferred to buy from young women, she said. With three kids, not wanting to find herself out of work in her 50s, she decided to start a restaurant.
In 1995, she started Camino Real, along U.S. 90 in Rosenberg. It was, according to her brother Oscar, “a tiny place that the previous owners had painted a certain shade of pink that made it look less like a Mexican restaurant and more like an outlet store for Mary Kay.”
Like most restaurateurs, she worked extraordinarily long hours, doing whatever needed to be done: ordering the liquor, greeting patrons at the front of the house, climbing a ladder in her heels to fiddle with a ceiling problem. Her kids grew up. She got a divorce.
But she had some success, and decided to move to the big city. She opened Sylvia’s Enchilada Kitchen restaurants in Houston — two of them, eventually, on the city’s wealthy west side. She started the cooking classes. She began writing a cookbook.
Her workaholism was a family joke. Once, someone said something to her youngest grandchild about going to Grandma’s house. “Grandma doesn’t have a house,” the little boy responded. “She lives at the restaurant.”
A little poison won’t kill you, but sometimes it’s hard to tell when you’ve had too much. Casares had set out to serve home cooking at her restaurants, to bring her family’s culture to the broader world. But those restaurants had taken over her home life.
‘Stupid way to die’
Since she worked all the time, maybe it was only natural that she became romantically involved with someone who worked at Sylvia’s. She and Michael Warren were together for four years. They broke up and he left the restaurant, but when he needed a job again, she hired him to drive the Sylvia’s catering van.
It didn’t work out. In March 2012, she had to fire him. They were at her house way out in the country, in Fulshear, on three acres of land. He’d driven there in the catering van, which she wanted him to leave. So she offered him a ride home.
She was cranking her SUV, when she saw him, in the passenger seat, moving strangely. Then he fired the gun.
She hadn’t known that he had a gun. She hadn’t thought he was dangerous. She was bleeding, heavily, from the abdomen. The bullet had pierced her colon in three spots.
She thought, “Oh, my God, am I going to die? This is a stupid way to die. All I’ve ever done is work.”
She rolled out of the car, screaming. She followed her ex into the house, begging him to call 911. He didn’t.
He washed his hands, walked back out to her SUV and drove it away — with her cellphone still in it.
Somehow she made it to her mother’s room in the back of the house. Her mother still had a land line, an old-school princess phone with a light-up dial. In the dark, on the floor, Casales tried to dial 911. But the three digits were too much for her: Instead of ringing, the phone played a strange tone.
She dialed a number she knew better, a number she could reproduce even in the dark, bleeding out. She dialed the Sylvia’s location on Woodway and asked them to send help.
‘What are dreams?’
Later — after she’d been Life Flighted to Memorial Hermann Hospital, after her ex had been apprehended, after it turned out that she wouldn’t die of sepsis — later she felt stupid.
Her mother offered the usual comfort. “You weren’t the first,” she said. “You won’t be the last.”
Casares, though, decided that she needed to change her life.
“What are your dreams?” her therapist asked.
“What are dreams?” she responded. During the months of recovery, her restaurants ran without her. She began to think about turning the day-to-day operations over to someone else, so she could focus just on the parts that, she realized, were her mission in life: coming up with the dishes, teaching people to cook, transmitting the culture.
That October, a friend recommended that she contact Don Guggenheim, who operated several restaurants and might have good advice. After meeting him, she sent Guggenheim a thank-you note.
He asked her out. You’d think that a woman recently shot by someone she’d worked with would hesitate to mix business with pleasure, would regard the invitation as poison. But Casares said yes.
They’ve been married two years now. Guggenheim handles her restaurants’ operations.
“I’ve gotten off the hamster wheel,” Casares said happily. Now she has time at home, and for the things she loves — including the tamale class.
The lard question
At Monday’s class, when the lard question came, it wasn’t the one that Casares expected. A white guy, the only man in the class, asked it.
He didn’t ask about substituting olive oil for the lard. Instead, he asked how to do lard right: “Do you render your own?”
Yes, Casares affirmed. Buying sheet lard from the butcher and rendering it yields better tamales than buying lard in those shelf-stable tubs.
The man nodded. Many things in this world will kill you, but a little poison won’t. Done right, a little poison can be life itself.