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10/04/2025

Today’s blog

Lynn Murphy Mark

Tamales!

Just back from New Mexico – which is not New, and not Mexico – I enjoyed the cuisine to the max. One of the things that attracts me is the memory of eating certain foods as a kid growing up in Mexico City. To my great delight, some of the same dishes are still around, at least 76 years later. 

One of my favorite things is “huevos rancheros”, or eggs “ranch style”. Two eggs are basted or cooked hard (my preference), placed on two corn tortillas, smothered in tomato based chile sauce and served with rice and beans. Only in New Mexico you can order them with “Christmas” sauce, a cute way to say both red and green chile sauce. Red sauce has a distinctive smokey flavor with a little bite, while green sauce features chunks of green chile, usually from Hatch, New Mexico, the chile capitol. 

In Southern Mexico, in the 1950’s and 60’s, I never heard of a “flour tortilla”. To me these are a bland imitation of the original item and fairly useless. A real corn tortilla is made from a special corn-based flour mixed with water and salt. When it is the consistency of play-doh the creator shapes little balls of dough. As a kid, there was a woman outside of our house who took the little balls, used her hands to pat them into thin disks, then cooked them over a little stove. They came into our house fresh and hot and delicious, especially with a little butter. Tortillas are staples in Mexican cooking.

I have to admit that wheat-flour tortillas have been around Northern Mexico since the Spaniards introduced wheat and wheat flour in the 16^th century. The climate there is better suited to growing wheat, thus the origin of the white version of a tortilla. They remain a staple in the North and a big part of what is called “Tex-Mex” cuisine. 

A few years ago, Jackie and I spent some days in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I did not expect to find a Mexican dish there but we went to a restaurant that featured “Ropa Vieja”, “Old Clothes”. It is called this odd name because it is made of shredded beef in a rich tomato and spices sauce, and somehow was thought to resemble a pile of old clothes. Anyway, I had not thought of this dish in decades and promptly ordered it for my dinner. (It turns out that Ropa Vieja is actually a Cuban dish, but somehow it found its way to my Mexican home where the cook made it with great regularity.) When I took the first bite I was immediately transported to childhood. I asked the waitress to please tell the cooks they had helped an old lady  straight back into a delicious memory. 

Nothing takes me back faster than to sample a good pork or chicken tamale. Making tamales is a labor of love, and no one ever makes a dozen and stops there. The two women we know who make tamales devote a whole day to making dozens of them. Then the delicacies are shared among the community. Last week, a Mexican friend of ours brought us a heavy bag filled with “rojo’s”, red pork ones. There is an art to making them that involves a special kind of corn husk, corn flour dough known as “masa”, and seasoned ingredients to wrap the masa around. The corn husks act as a wrapper for each tamale, and wrapping them just so is an art. Then the creation is steamed carefully to cook the dough.

When I worked at Ortiz Middle School in Santa Fe I was introduced to a grown man, a former student at Ortiz. Once a week he would come to the school office bearing a load of tamales that he sold at a fair price. I never passed up a chance to buy his wares because they were delicious, and spiced just right, in my opinion. Dinner those nights was a trip down memory lane for me.

My “Mo Bro”, Mark Zigrang, and I shared a love of tamales. Mark has since made his transition, far too young to be lost to us. When he and Mary would visit us in New Mexico we would go to a particular restaurant that featured the closest version to my childhood tamales. Both of us always ordered the pork and the chicken tamales. In New Mexico, pork tamales are in a red sauce and chicken tamales in a green sauce. Whoever was with us would hold their conversations while the two of us basked in the wonderfulness of good tamales. Every time I eat a tamale, I say a little prayer of thanksgiving to Mark, and miss him terribly.

We ate the last of the tamales last night, having taken them to share with Donna at our routine Friday “movie night”. I schooled her in the authenticity of what she was eating. I’m pretty sure she enjoyed the fare!