Tamale Time

When I was a girl, my mom and a neighbor would sit on the front porch with stew pots full of freshly picked green beans at their feet, snapping the ends off and breaking them for canning. They would sit and talk and snap for hours.  I recall once stumbling onto five old women sitting in a circle of rocking chairs and doing something similar in the shade of a big oak tree when I was in North Carolina.  I wandered over and spoke to them, recalling how it had brought back my childhood memories.

Today I traveled about 50 minutes out of town to make tamales with a friend.  We both love to cook, and she has a bigger kitchen and better food prep equipment, so I go to her. We don't get to visit often but this tradition started several years ago.  We both worked for NASA but different locations.  We emailed or talked by phone about food discoveries.  We felt like good friends even though we had never met face to face.  One day she suggested that we take our days off and make tamales together. I had never been wild about tamales and certainly never made them, but I wanted to get to know her better. I knew she'd lived in Mexico for several years, so "Why not?" I wondered.

(Well, first off as an aside, the only reason I'd never liked tamales is that I had never had her tamales.)

In the beginning we did this about every 6-8 months, but she's been as busy as I have over the last year or so, and today we recollected that it had been almost two years.  Since I drive, she does the food prep, then we sit and roll tamales: first spreading the maize/cornmeal paste onto the moist corn husks, then adding a spicy filling, and finally, rolling and tying the little packets of flavor.  As soon as we have one pot full, the steaming begins; they cook for an hour while we roll more tamales. Eagerly, we wait for the first batch to finish cooking so that we can taste them.  You know, just so we can make sure they are "OK."

We spent close to five hours on today's project.  Like my mother and her friend and similar to the women in their rocking chairs under the oak tree, our conversations meandered all over. Recent employment.  Next career steps. Relationship histories. How she found her house...or it found her. Her grandfather's refugee history and the contribution of four generations of his progeny had made after landing on the shores of the U.S.  Scientists, teachers, business people and entrepreneurs, and even the seemingly inevitable immigrant restaurateurs. We agreed that probably his family was not that different from many refugee experiences.

Absent our devices, what amazes me each time is the level of intimacy that we develop just rolling tamales.  I realize that part of what has been lost in potlucks is the intimacy of cooking together. Maybe that is only true of cooks, but I know for me there is something quite wonderful about preparing food over conversation.  Today I am happy to report on wonderful connected time...and a bin of homemade tamales...to warm my heart and my soul this evening.