TAMALES
lumbian feasts.
“Their trade routes went all the way up to Minnesota,” Serrato said, explaining why she works with a variety of native North American ingredients. “So ingredients like wild amaranth and bison would have also met the tamal.”
To make a small batch of her blue corn and bison tamales this year, Serrato bought meat from a local rancher, and braised it until it pulled apart with the gentle nudge of a fork.
She dressed the meat in a dark, smoky salsa of puréed red chiles, onion and garlic, and wrapped the tamales with her sister and sister-inlaw, sitting at a table in her outdoor kitchen. It was a smaller scene than in years before, but the women still lit sage, drank tequila and danced.
Right out of the pot, Serrato’s tamales were the color of wet stone, porous, tender and springy. Inside, the threads of meat were pleasingly wild and gamy, bright with chile rojo. The tamal, rushing with a perfumed steam, tasted almost alive.
“This is it,” said Andrea Serrato, her sister, scraping every bit of masa from the corn husk. “This is the best, best, best you’ve ever made!” They argued briefly over the amount of salt in the masa, and planned to meet the following weekend to make more tamales to sell locally via Instagram, as they do every year.
Karla Vasquez didn’t grow up making tamales at home, but her family always bought tamales de pollo at Christmastime from women in the Salvadoran community who ran small, seasonal businesses in Los Angeles.
“Tamal culture is so prevalent in Latin American countries,” said Vasquez, who is currently working on a Salvadoran cookbook. “And so many workingclass women in my family have relied on those food
sales at different times in their lives.”
After thousands of the city’s restaurant workers lost their jobs in the pandemic, many turned to wrapping tamales at home with their families, selling them in the mornings alongside corn-based drinks – unsweetened, porridgelike atole, and sweeter, chocolate-colored champurrado.
Israel Ricardo Luis, a restaurant cook from Oaxaca who was furloughed, now sells the extra-long, banana-wrapped tamales
that he and his family make together and supplements that income working for a delivery service.
Their tamales de mole are smoky and tangy, rich with the fruit of dried chiles. The masa is moist and tender and thoroughly seasoned – worth the mess you make if you can’t wait to get home and start eating them right out of the plastic bag over the steering wheel of your car.
Though the work of making tamales has historically belonged to women, and been passed down through generations of women, men do study and practice the craft.
Alfonso Martinez, who runs the pop-up Poncho’s Tlayudas, makes Oaxacanstyle tamales de frijol for special occasions, such as saints’ days and festivals, serving them with a soup made from dried beef ribs, as it would be by Zapotec communities in the Sierra Norte.
The tamal seems simple – a filling of black beans, puréed with onion and garlic – but the wrapping process is intricate.
Martinez presses a ball of masa as if he were making a tortilla, then covers it with bean purée. As he folds the circle, he spreads more beans on the newly exposed masa, spreading and folding, spreading and folding, until he’s left with a small, pudgy parcel full of hidden layers.
Sandwiched with fresh avocado leaves, and wrapped in a softened banana leaf, the tamal takes on all of the delicate, herbaceous flavors around it. Though this tamal is vegan, many kinds, across cultures, are bound with animal fats – often lard – girdling meat and cheese.
Chayanne Sarabia, who was born in East Los Angeles and runs Shane’s Tamales, started making vegan tamales for friends and family in 2009, looking to re-create his childhood memories of red pork and green chicken tamales.
Sarabia cooks mushrooms instead of pork. He replaces chicken with a shredded wheat-and-soy mixture which he marinates, dehydrates and simmers in his mother’s green chile for a gently bouncy texture, infused with the tang of tomatillos and garlic.
When he plates a tamal, he unwraps it most of the way, so its chubby shape is revealed, then serves it open-faced, scattered with thinly sliced, pink pickled onions, a dribble of salsa, seasonal flowers and herbs.
It’s beautiful, and a reminder that the tamal is a special, celebratory, valuable food that has never stopped evolving.
“Yes, you can buy a tamal on the street for two bucks, but it’s not street food,” Serrato said. “It’s a portal, it’s a storyteller, it’s a carrier of ancestral memory, and it’s gone through a lot of hands.”