Tamales
Finding comfort and connection with delicious
To understand how deeply tamal culture runs through California, you have to know why Enrique Zaragoza and his cellmates collected bags of Chili Cheese Fritos from the Centinela State Prison commissary.
Crushed into a soft, umami-rich powder, then hydrated to form a grainy mash, the chips stood in for masa. Using a piece of plastic, the men pressed and rolled it around a snack pack of cheddar and Chata-brand chilorio, building makeshift, contraband pork tamales to mark holidays in their cells.
“It was something to look forward to,” said Zaragoza, who is no longer incarcerated, and recently ground corn by hand to make tamales at home. “It was the food that made us come back to ourselves.”
The Mesoamerican dumpling, made with nixtamalized corn dough and a variety of fillings, has been around for thousands of years. Called tamalli in Nahuatl, a language spoken by Indigenous peoples in southern Mexico and Central America, it’s still referred to in its singular as a tamal, or tamale.
It can be a source of deliciousness, comfort, cultural connection or income, but the tamal is not a monolith, and there’s no single, correct way to make it.
“We take it for granted in Los Angeles, but to have access to all these different kinds of handmade tamales, it’s everything,” said Claudia Serrato, a teacher and cook who uses a creaky,
metal grinder to mill nixtamal into a fresh, intensely sweet-smelling flour called masa harina.
Many cooks buy the flour, then season and knead it to make their dough. Others buy the ready, seasoned dough – masa preparada – at grocery stores and shops, or from their favorite tamaleras, who often sell their own carefully calibrated mixes by the pound.
But Serrato likes to make it all herself. She soaks whole kernels with slaked lime, known as cal, overnight. The next day, she grinds the swollen kernels and kneads the flour with stock and whipped, shiny vegetable shortening to make a dough. The masa is a large, heavy mass, and preparing it requires time and muscle.
“I know some people see it as a tedious task,” said Serrato, who’s interested in native ingredients and the Indigenous foodways that predate colonization of the Americas. “But for me, this is about family and cultura. It’s what brings us together.”
At one of Serrato’s tamaladas, you might catch up with more than a dozen friends and family over drinks, all the while learning how to feel for when the raw masa is hydrated so it’s exactly the right kind of sticky, to spread it evenly across the wrapper and to leave a certain amount of space on the corn husk, so the tamal folds neatly and evenly.
You might learn more about who your auntie is dating, but also how to check if a tamal is cooked through, to note how the perfectly cooked masa peels away from the husk, bearing the imprint of its fine ridges.
Knowledge is preserved and passed on in this vital intergenerational space – grandmothers teaching grandsons, cousins correcting each other, friends sharing their own families’ tips and tricks.
For Serrato, it is even devotional. The slow process of making tamales, which begins with buying the corn, traces a line back to her Purépecha and Huastec ancestors in Mexico, who likely made plant- and insect-based fillings for their corn parcels, decorating them with seeds, leaves and flowers, and serving them at pre-Co