This chapter explores a tradition through selected dishes and stories. Customs vary across households, regions, and generations.
Walk into a kitchen in Boyle Heights in mid-December and you'll find it running like a small, joyful factory. Corn husks soak in a sink. A vat of red chile pork sits ready. The abuela has the masa, and she is the one who decides when it's right. Around the table, hands move in practiced order, spread, fill, fold, and the finished tamales stack up in their husks by the tray, by the dozen, by the hundred. There's music, there's coffee, there's somebody being teased for spreading the masa too thick.
This is the heart of a Mexican Christmas, and here is the thing worth knowing before you take a bite: the tamale in your hand is older than the holiday it's celebrating. Far older. While most of this book is about traditions a century or two deep, this one reaches back thousands of years, to a food that was ancient and sacred on this continent long before there was a Christmas to attach it to. It is, very likely, the oldest thing on any Christmas table in America.
The flesh of the gods
Tamales are Mesoamerican, and their roots run almost unbelievably deep, by some accounts as far back as five to eight thousand years, through the Olmec and the Maya and the Mexica we call the Aztec.
Tamales have roots that long predate Christmas in the Americas. Today they are part of many different regional and household celebrations. This Smithsonian account of Las Posadas offers one community’s perspective on food and the season.
How the ancient food found Christmas
So how did a pre-Columbian offering become the centerpiece of a Mexican Christmas Eve? The way these things usually happen: the new faith arrived, and the old food was too important to give up, so it moved in.
Counted in dozens
Which is why, in East LA, Christmas isn't really counted in days. It's counted in dozens.
Tamales at this time of year are a currency of love. Families make them by the literal hundred, then divvy them up and send them out, to neighbors, coworkers, the cousins across town, the friend who's alone this year. For those who don't make their own, the tamale shops and the tamaleras become December institutions; lines run out the door, some shops drop everything else on the menu just to keep the steamers full, and the smart buyer orders early or goes without. And the making of them is the tamalada, the assembly-line gathering where the dozens get born. The abuela presides; the masa is judged against her standard; the recipe is often less a recipe than a remembered list of ingredients and a pair of hands that know the feel. There's a saying that whoever laughs the most makes the best tamales, because joy softens the masa, and the ones who don't show up to help get lovingly, mercilessly talked about. The fillings come in a rotation everyone knows: red chile pork, chicken in green salsa, rajas con queso, and the sweet pink ones with raisins and cinnamon for the kids. There's champurrado on the stove to keep everyone going.
Unwrap the husk
And then, finally, the moment the whole long season points to: you peel back a warm husk, and the steam rises, and the masa pulls away clean.
In that small gesture is a thread that runs back five thousand years. The hands that fold a tamale in Boyle Heights tonight are doing what hands did in Mesoamerica before there were calendars to mark the date, wrapping corn around sustenance, making the sacred food of the gathering. The grandmother teaches the technique; the child learns the patience; the dozens go out the door to half the neighborhood. Nothing about it is fast, and that's exactly the point.
The oldest food on the continent, made by the dozen, by the women who carry the recipe in their hands. The husk is just the wrapping. What's inside is five thousand years old, and still warm, and still given away by the armful to everyone you love. Unwrap it, and you're holding the most ancient Christmas in America.
