EVERY December, Justina Lagunas spends her workday making tamales in the open kitchen that looks over the produce section at Pro’s Ranch Market, a grocery store in the heavily Hispanic enclave where she lives. There are pork tamales and beef tamales, the meat cooked in a spicy sauce of red New Mexico chiles. It is Christmastime and tamales are in high demand. Three weeks ago, Ms. Lagunas made 10,000 tamales. Last week, as four more women joined her four-woman team, she made 30,000 tamales. Then she went home and made some more tamales — 100 for her granddaughter’s fourth birthday party and another 100 for the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe at St. Matthew Roman Catholic Church, where she and her husband and their daughters attend Mass on Sundays. Her homemade tamales are different from the tamales she makes at the store: the sauce is made of green serrano peppers. It is a recipe she learned as a young bride 42 years ago in the village of Tlaxmalac, in the Mexican state of Guerrero, and it is exactly the type of tamale her husband adores and her daughters have learned to make. Tamales are a particular taste memory, not unlike your mother’s Thanksgiving stuffing with oysters or the French Canadian meat pie spiked with Cognac that Uncle Leo always bakes. For Ms. Lagunas, Christmas is not Christmas if it does not have her homemade tamales, even if it means getting up before the sun or going to bed after the rest of the house has long fallen asleep. “Tradición,” Ms. Lagunas explained. Tradition. Making tamales, she said, is about rekindling the ritual of women gathering in the kitchen to make something cherished and eaten all throughout the holidays — at intimate gatherings and at open-house parties, where they are brought on paper plates or in plastic bags, to be eaten then and to be eaten later. Gustavo Arellano, the writer behind the widely popular syndicated column “¡Ask a Mexican!”, said it is through the process of making tamales that culture is communicated across generations, encompassing the value of family, nourishment and collectiveness. “Tamales are a magical thing,” he said. The tradition is not exactly the same for Ms. Lagunas in this country, far from her extended family and constrained by her exhausting workday at this time of the year. But if it is a little lonely, she does not seem to mind. When it comes time to make tamales in Ms. Lagunas’s humble kitchen, her older daughter, Carmen, 32, comes by after her daughters are asleep to help peel the tomatoes for the sauce. And her younger daughter, Alondra, 15, helps her shred the pork that will be used for the stuffing. Her husband, Leovegildo Urbina, keeps her company as she cooks. He says her tamales taste just as good as they did back home. The sauce is spicy enough to make your tongue tingle, but not so spicy that it overwhelms the distinct taste of cloves and cumin, which Ms. Lagunas uses for seasoning. The pork is tender; she uses shoulder. The dough, or masa, is so moist it crumbles as you bite into it, like a cake with a crumb texture that is just right. The tradition of tamaladas, as the tamale-cooking feasts are known, is upheld. The tamales are made by women, as they have been since pre-Columbian times. They are easily transportable, wrapped in husks and stuffed in bags or arranged inside vaporeras, the large steaming pots Mexican women might carry to roadside stands to keep the tamales warm. They are eaten all year, but during the holiday season, which for Mexicans extends from the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on Dec. 12 through Three Kings’ Day on Jan. 6, they are a culinary requirement, like Christmas cookies. They can be bought at supermarkets here for about $15 a dozen (or from the Williams-Sonoma catalog for $60, in an unquestionable mainstreaming of a quintessentially immigrant holiday staple). In Mexico, the most traditional tamales are made from pork or chunks of beef, though chicken (leg meat, preferably; the breast can be too dry) is also popular. In the southwestern state of Oaxaca, tamales are wrapped in plantain leaves and filled with chicken and onions flavored by mole negro, a sauce of poblano peppers and chocolate. In Tabasco, on the Gulf Coast, they are filled with garfish. In Venezuela, tamales are called hallacas and are stuffed with pork, raisins and olives. In Cuba, masa and meat are cooked together on the stove in a porridge-like concoction called tamal en cazuela.
