On the Dumpling Trail: Salvadoran Tamales
With a few tips from my first try at making them
Hello! If this is your first time reading my dispatch: thank you for popping by – I hope you’ll return. And if you’ve been here before, welcome back!
I’ll be honest. I didn’t think of the implications of setting Sunday as a publishing day when I have (immovable) deadlines some weekends (like this one!). Because of this, I’m moving this newsletter’s publishing day to a weekday. Likely Monday or Tuesday. Maybe Wednesday or Thursday. I’m still figuring things out.
Today’s dispatch is the first in an occasional series on my kitchen adventures with the dumpling diaspora. I love dumplings: smallish parcels of stuff in stuff (or, at least, that’s how I define them). This time, I’m making Salvadoran chicken tamales. No original recipe to share, but links with helpful recipes are provided.
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On the Dumpling Trail: Salvadoran Tamales
Since reviewing The Guanaquita, I’ve been thinking of tamales a lot.
At Irma Donan’s dtk restaurant, chicken tamales arrive in their banana leaf swaddling. Peeling them back reveals a steamed, savoury, silky masa parcel nuggetted with potatoes, chickpeas, carrots, and green olives. Inside, along with shredded chicken, is a smear of recaudo, an aromatic red sauce that (along with the flavours imparted from the leaves) gives the dish a complex depth. It is a deceptively simple thing.
A bit of history
Tamales are an ancient food, inextricably linked to Mesoamerican culture and history. Mesoamerica – the geographical stretch from what’s now central Mexico to most of Central America (Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica) was a cradle of civilisation, home to the Olmecs. They settled in tropical lowlands in present-day Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco. In transitioning from a nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a sedentary/farming one, they domesticated a number of crops, including beans, avocado, and vanilla, but maize (specifically, teosinte, a wild grass) became a primary staple.
For ancient Mayan, Aztec, and Olmec civilisations, maize also held religious and cultural significance. The fourth book of Popol Vuh (the Mayan creation story) describes how the creators ground corn into a dough to create humans. Specific aspects of maize’s lifecycle were embodied in Aztec deities: Cinteotl, a youthful god was "deified corn;" Xilonen, a virginal goddess, was "fresh, tender corn," while Chicomecoatl personified mature, ripened corn.
Mesoamericans first made tamales about 7000 to 10 000 years ago. As the food travelled, teosinte and maize pastes were filled with vegetables, fruits, meats, honey, or eggs. Afterwards, the dumplings were wrapped in corn husks, banana leaves, or tree barks before being cooked in a fire’s hot ashes. The Spanish introduced new fillings and flavours, such as pork and lard, which were adopted; European pots and pans, allowed cooks to steam the dumplings.
As a food, tamales were (and are) ideal for stretching small amounts of proteins or other fillings to feed many—some say they were ideal for warriors and hunters to take with them as they left their homes and villages.
Tamales were also made for religious ceremonies and festivals, and offered to the gods. Texcatlicpoca, an omnipotent creator god, was fed bean tamales. Huehueteotl, the fire god received ones made with shrimp. Tlaloc, the rain god, had ones filled with huitlacoche (corn smut). Xipe Totec, the god of death and rebirth, was fed honey and bean-fed tamales.
The mashed maize used for those first tamales wasn’t like the masa dough we make today. Maize is still used to make masa flour, but the kernels’ outer husks are difficult to digest. Sometime between 1500 and 1200 BCE, Mesoamericans discovered nixtamalization, a process where dried maize is steeped and cooked in an alkaline solution (then, it was water mixed with ashes; today, it’s usually water with food-grade calcium hydroxide). Afterwards, the vegetable is drained and rinsed and the outer husks were removed, which made the kernels easier to grind into a wet dough called fresh masa. Today, fresh masa is dried and powdered to create masa flour. The term “nixtamalization” combines two Nahuatl terms: nixtli (ashes) and tamalli (cooked maize masa).
In my kitchen
In El Salvador, tamales are often made at Christmastime. I can see why. While they are tasty, perfect for serving large numbers, and imbued with long traditions, they are not a quick dish to make. To make them, you need to make several components first, but most should be familiar to many home cooks:
Making chicken broth (or stock, as I did) from scratch could be done the night before – and takes little effort. Shredding cooked chicken is easy enough with a couple of forks.
The recaudo sauce starts with dry toasting the spices – similar to what’s done in many Indian dishes. The keys are to keep the spices moving in the oil-less, hot pan and keep your eye (and nose) out, to ensure they don’t burn.
Filling the dough can be messy, but it’s basically layering ingredients.
The trickiest bit might be wrapping them, which involves folding and a bit of rolling (admittedly, I’m not great at that and ended up making extra masa to cover the filling).
As to steaming, I just put a round cake cooling rack in a kettle/pot (as I do when I steam the Christmas Pudding) and fill it with water to the top of the rack and then layer the parcels on top. Check the water levels every 30 minutes or so, so it doesn’t boil dry.
Is the effort worth it? Definitely. The banana leaves not only impart some of their flavour into the tamale, but they also keep the dumplings moist and tender, and (frankly) unless you’re feeding a crowd, you can stash some in the freezer for the next time the craving hits.
I hope to share a recipe once I’m more practised, but until then, click here and here and here for recipes that guided me.
New from me:
Nothing!
What I’m reading:
Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson. Admittedly, it was a busy week, so I didn’t make any progress this week.
Foodish things I’m doing:
Had a great interview last week for an upcoming Grand Magazine column, so I’ll be working on that, and will need to source ingredients for what looks like the tasty accompanying recipe