When we were in Memphis a few months ago I saw signs in a restaurant on Beale Street advertising that it had Hot Tamales. I thought it was strange to find that in the Mississippi Delta so far away from Mexico so I had to try them. They were the worst tamales ever. They’re wrapped in parchment paper not corn husk. They were the size of a woman’s index finger, greasy, bland, and with some hot sauce thrown in somewhere. And I believe they were fried. The meat was ground and the masa wasn’t masa it was just regular ol’ cornmeal. It tasted like wet cornbread with some nasty meat in the middle. So I just went away trying to get the taste of these terrible tamales out of my mouth and mind.
About a month later I was listening to KNPR and there was a story on about how the tamale came to the Mississippi Delta. About 100 years ago Mexican migrant workers came to work in cotton fields out here. They worked side by side with black sharecroppers and workers. It gets cold out here when it does get cold and the black workers brought their lunches into the fields in lunchpails and had food like pork, cornbread, etc, stuff that either went out cold or soon got cold before it was eaten. The Mexicans brought tamales for lunch that were wrapped and packed up tight in lard buckets that kept the tamales warm. The black workers recognized the main ingredients of the tamales and thought it was a great idea instead of their cold lunches. I just wish one of those Mexican workers had let one of the black workers taste his tamale.