With a personal 65-year run of serving Austinites her family’s recipes, Tamale House owner and longtime restaurateur Diane Valera was selected to give a master class in traditional tamale making.
On an almost unbelievably noisy Sunday afternoon , I called Tamale House East to learn about the tradition and technique of tamales. Between bouts, Carmen and Diane Valera, a daughter and mother team who are part of a family that has been operating a restaurant or food producing company in Austin for almost 100 years, shared a lot of history.
Prior to the holiday season, the tamale migrated from Mexico and Guatemala to the rest of Latin America. Then the tradition spread north, to Texas and California. Valera told me about the Mississippi Delta tamale trail, of which there is a map of spots to tour, or aAs for the Christmas tradition, Carmen says tamale season usually begins on December 12 – coincidentally, Diane's birthday – also the Feast of our Lady of Guadalupe.
When they moved back to East 7th, they named it the Tamale House and thought they could get away with the same thing, i.e., no tamales. Carmen was blunt. “People got really mad. ‘Whaddya mean you don’t have tamales!?’ So I said, look, Mom, we’re going to make them but make them bigger. A whole meal. It’s the same amount of labor. So we made large tamales. Developed a chicken tomatillo. Then we did bean and cheese, then the vegan thing happened, so we started making a vegan tamale.
Tamale-making is a very physical activity. Tamale House East doesn't use a machine for any part of the process. Carmen laughed, “There’s machines where you put everything in and a tamale pops out. But from beginning to end, we don’t use machines or anything like that in our process. The only tech we use is the stove.”
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