Tamales de Pollo con Chile Verde (Tamales with Chicken in Green Sauce)

One of the most important foods in Mexican tradition and to my family is the tamal.  Tamales are mainly made of masa, or finely ground hominy wrapped and steamed in corn husks or banana leaves. They can have a variety of sweet or savory fillings.  They are very difficult time consuming to prepare and thus are typically served in special occasions.  My family always has tamales on Christmas.  Every year, the women in my family set aside an entire day in the week leading up to Christmas to communally prepare tamales. In order to efficiently make an enormous quantity of them, we form an assembly line, with each family member performing a different step in the process. By the end of the day, we have enough tamales to last everybody several weeks and some to give to our friends.  This process and hard work are a part of my most treasured memories of Christmas and the holidays.  Tamal day is one of the only times every year that everyone is in the same place and it marks a time of celebration.  Tamal day is also the time when you get to hear the best “chisme” (gossip) all year.  All day while we make tamales, the women in my family chat in Spanglish; by the end of this long day we all know everything interesting that has happened to everyone we know since the last time we were all together.  My mother is from a very small Mexican town, so naturally “chisme” plays a significant role in the culture of the town.  You can’t have good chisme without tamal day and close family and friends.

However sexist, in my family and in much of Mexican tamal tradition, only women are taught the tamal making process and enlisted to help out on tamal day.  The process has been passed from mother to daughter or grandmother to granddaughter since beyond anyone in my family’s memory.  This dish and the process of making it also has a strong emotional significance for me because of my memories of my mom slowing teaching me how to make them and becoming slightly more involved every year.  Every time she would teach me a new step in the process she would tell me about when she learned how to do that step from her Nana Clara, and exactly what Nana Clara said to do.  Tamales bring me closer to the people I love and connect me to the distant past of my long-gone ancestors.  Another interesting thing about my family’s tradition of passing down recipes, is that everything is communicated verbally, and pupils learn by doing.  In fact, this is probably the first time this recipe has ever been written down.  Writing an official recipe for these tamales was difficult, as none of the specific amounts or ratios of ingredients have ever been specified.  Everything is measured by sight, taste and prior knowledge.  To truly know how to make my family’s tamales one must be a participant in several tamal days.

Tamales are as ancient as Mexico itself.  The first tamales were made in precolonial Mesoamerica by native Mexicans.  Tamales were often used as ceremonial food on religious holidays and days of celebration.  Corn, being native to the Americas was a vital staple food for the natives of ancient Latin-America.  Corn was such a large contributor to the livelihood of ancient Mesoamericans that many worshipped a corn deity.  The tamal spread from Mexico to much of Central and South America and the Caribbean.  Now, every region has a distinct version of the tamal, however they are all recognizable by their outer layer of corn husk or banana leaf and the masa inside.  Tamales are still made and eaten for the same reasons they have been for thousands of years; to celebrate religious holidays and family.

Receta (recipe):

Ingredients:

2 pounds masa

1 pound lard

6-8 serrano chiles

3 pounds tomatillos

1.5 pounds chicken, boiled and shredded

Salt

½ onion

2 cloves of garlic

Several family members

Procedure:

1. Soak the corn husks in hot water.
2. Shell the tomatillos and cook them in water in a large pot with the chiles until they are soft.
3. While the tomatillos and chiles are cooking, knead the masa in a large bowl for 10 minutes. Add a small amount of melted lard and continue kneading.  Repeat this every few minutes until the masa is fluffy.
4. Use a blender to grind together the cooked tomatillos, onion, and garlic. Add 2-3 chiles at a time, blend, and taste until the sauce is the desired spiciness. It should be VERY spicy but not inedible. Salt to taste
5. Stir the shredded chicken into the tomatillo sauce.
6. Choose the largest corn husks and spread a thin layer of masa on the smooth side of each one. The masa should be spread until there is 1 cm of open husk on the flat end and either side of the husk and it reaches halfway up the length of the husk.
7. Place a small amount of filling (chicken in green sauce) over the masa in each corn husk. Make sure it does not spill over the borders of the masa.
8. Fold the husk. First, fold the right side and left side over the filling so they both completely cover it (in thirds), and then fold the thin end of the husk up.
9. Steam the tamales in a covered tamalera (tamal pot) or large regular pot with a vegetable steamer with water. Line the pot with left over husks before placing the tamales in it. Steam them for 40 minutes to an hour.  Check the water level at regular intervals; it should never touch the tamales, but add more if most of it has evaporated.
10. Serve or refrigerate. Tamales can also be frozen for greater longevity.