Neto's Tucson: Missing out (again) on a Christmas food tradition

Ah, as I write this, I can smell the delectable odor wafting from the large olla on the stove filled with steaming tamales, mixed with the aroma of the meat in the chile colorado cooked the night before. What a wonderful tradition to look forward to and to celebrate with family.

But I have a confession: I don’t cook my Christmas tamales at home. Haven’t been to a family tamalada, a tamal-making party, in years. I can’t remember the last time I did.

How embarrassing for a Tucson homeboy. I love my Chicano-borderlands’ culture, history and traditions yet I haven’t plunged my hands into a tub of masa or spread the masa across the hoja, the leafy corn husk.

I buy my tamales from a hardworking woman who lives on the south side and makes tamales year round. And if I don’t buy them, I mooch off my family. Either way I’ve lost my way in maintaining this cultural ritual.

But a friend from my Cholla High School days refuses to give up the tradition. If anything, it means more now than ever before, said Elvia Corral Gandara.

“It’s a huge thing for my daughters and me. I want them to know what my grandmothers and mother taught me,” she said by phone Thursday.

That’s the beauty of making tamales. It’s a bonding experience. It’s not just slathering the masa on the husk but it’s more about maintaining memories and creating new ones.

“It’s something that I cherish,” said Gandara, who works at the University of Arizona.

Like others, Gandara joins more than one tamalada during the Christmas rush. One is with her sister Elsa Corral-Aguirre and mother, Romelia Corral, and maybe a cousin and an aunt. The other is with her two young adult daughters, Kristen and Krystal Gandara.

And in both there are no men.

That’s not a tamal-making rule, however. As a kid when our family made tamales, I remember my maternal grandfather playing a role, limited as it was. He massaged the masa in a small tub. But I don’t remember him working on the assembly line. That was left to the women and teenagers, who, as a rule, were strictly overseen by the women who were quick with instructions:

“That’s too much masa.” “You didn’t spread it evenly.” “Make them bigger.” “Make them smaller.” “Quit playing around.”

For Gandara and her family, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas if they didn’t make tamales.

“I would feel terrible if I didn’t,” she said, refusing to imagine a holiday season without her family around her and steaming pots filled with tamales.

Carmen Villa Prezelski also continues the tradition, trying “to come as close to replicate my mother’s tamales which she made well into her 90s,” she said.

“It was a big production. She ground her own corn,” Prezelski said, adding she buys her masa at the store to shorten the time and process.

Prezelski has experimented with her mother Matilde Villa’s formula but she can’t quite match it. For example, her mother had a sure-fire way of knowing when the masa was ready.

“She would spread the masa on the palm of her hand to test it,” Prezelski said. “It had to feel just right.”

Her mother, who died two months short of her 100th birthday in 2005, was such a good tamal maker that the now-gone El Rancho Grande Cafe on East Broadway near Park Avenue hired Villa to make tamales at Christmas time, said Prezelski, who for 14 years wrote a weekly column about food, family, culture and local history for the Tucson Citizen.

These days, Prezelski and her husband Tom, known to some people as “Sarge,” make their tamales, between 20 and 30 dozen. And she has a secret to her method:

“I’ve never been able to do them sitting down. I have to be on my feet,” she said. “It doesn’t feel right.”

I know I’ve missed out. Making tamales was part of my youth and it’s a connection that I’ve lost. But there’s always next year to make tamales.

As for this year, I’ll take an invitation.