What Is a Tamalada? Why Families Make Tamales by the Dozen

How the assembly line works

In 2008 The Christian Science Monitor described a San Antonio tamalada that started with snacks, drinks and a turkey dinner before anyone touched the masa. Then the line formed: masa beaten with lard, spread on corn husks, filled with pork, garlic and chile, folded and wrapped, with plenty of gossip about relatives along the way.

The numbers get big. One cook told the Monitor that her grandmother's family made 40 dozen tamales in a single day and froze them for Christmas. Austin chefs interviewed by The Austin Chronicle described the same thing: weekends of dozens upon dozens, or work that began after Thanksgiving so the tamales were ready for Christmas Eve.

Why the holidays

The historian Pilar Zazueta, a lecturer at the University of Texas, told the Chronicle that tamales became tied to the holidays partly because making them is slow, social work that goes best with many hands. She added that tamaladas help families keep their knowledge, their identity and their ties to relatives abroad.

Christmas is not the only tamal day. In Mexico, Día de la Candelaria on February 2 is another, and custom says whoever finds the baby figure in the Rosca de Reyes owes the tamales, La Razón explains. Rajas, green, mole and sweet tamales are the most common, which is where our pink tamales de dulce come in.

For the savory batch, our red chile pork tamales follow Rick Bayless's central Mexican recipe: guajillo-simmered pork in light, lard-beaten masa, steamed about 1 1/4 hours.

An ancient food

The tamal is much older than Christmas. The word comes from the Nahuatl tamalli by way of Mexican Spanish, and English speakers turned the plural tamales into a new singular, tamale. Tamales are thousands of years old in Mesoamerica, though how many thousands is disputed.

One firm early sighting is in the San Bartolo murals of Guatemala, painted about 100 BC, where tamales appear as offerings, including a pot of them carried to the maize god, Archaeology magazine reports. Zazueta notes that in the Aztec world, unfilled tamales were served with a chocolate drink at a celebration for the god of rain.

The Texas tamalada

In Texas the tradition grew public as well as private. San Antonio's chili queens sold food in the city's plazas from the 1860s until the late 1930s, and when Stephen Crane visited in 1895 he listed tamales among the dishes, the historian Frank W. Jennings writes. Zazueta told the Chronicle that San Antonio and El Paso were among the first Texas cities with a commercial holiday tamale trade, with businesses selling to the public by the 1920s.

By 2008 one San Antonio restaurant, Mi Tierra, told the Monitor it sold roughly 250,000 tamales between early December and New Year's Day. Home cooks there like them stuffed generously; as one put it, nobody wants more dough than filling. Our San Antonio Christmas tamales roll them long and thin. See every style in our tamales hub and the rest of the holiday table in our Christmas recipes.

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