Christmas in the City of Angels
Living in New York, it's hard not to think of the tree at Rockefeller Center, warm chestnuts for sale at sidewalk carts and window shopping along Madison Avenue as holiday delights. But, my friend Erica recently explained to me that the holidays look very different when she's back home in Los Angeles.
There, Christmas isn't about snowmen and Buche Noel. It's about tamales (pictured above). Every Christmas morning since she was a little girl, she has been woken by her mother at the crack of dawn to join the women of the household in the painstaking preparation of a tamale feast.
And, according to an article by Corie Brown in the Los Angeles Times, Erica's family is not alone in this tradition:
Like just about everyone in Los Angeles, I've happily eaten tamales of every shape and flavor, in styles from all around Latin America. Whether wrapped in dried corn husks, banana or avocado leaves, filled with pork, peppers or chocolate, this traditional Christmas holiday treat is available here all year long in a seemingly endless variety...
...Eating freshly made, just-steamed tamales is a pleasure usually reserved for the Latin American families who have passed recipes from generation to generation and shown them off at tamale-making parties during the Christmas holidays. That's how Alice Tapp and her daughter, the owners of Tamara's Tamales in Venice, perfected their techniques.
Alice's Mexican grandmother taught her how to make tamales when she was a little girl in East Los Angeles; she loved to join her grandmother's friends selling the corn husk-wrapped treats after Sunday Mass at Our Lady of Guadalupe. Collecting tamale recipes and chronicling the centuries-old traditions for herself and her American children became a lifelong hobby.
A self-proclaimed "gringa" from Kansas, Brown goes on to detail her in-depth Latin lesson in making masa, filling, stuffing, wrapping and steaming. Time-consuming, but worth it, once the fragrant, moist, sweet corn and spicy babies land on your plate. Makes me want to price a plane ticket to LA and see if Erica's family might let me join in the festivities.