Carrying On the Family Tradition

The masa was ready. A large bowl of thick cornmeal dough that holds together tamales and generations of Mexican families sat on the table, ready to be molded into the traditional Christmas staple.

The meat had been slowly boiled, the chiles cooked and seasoned. The cornhusks were soaked in warm water, the rough leaves giving way to soft and translucent wrappers.

Now Leovijilda Cortez and two of her daughters began the rhythmic slapping, spreading and folding of tamale-making, gestures that came to them with effortless familiarity.

Their job: to prepare almost 400 tamales that will be the main course today for the 40 or so relatives gathered in Montebello to celebrate the holiday.

The small apartment already looked ready for Christmas. Fanciful paper candy canes decorated the walls. Several packages’wrapped in blue paper sat under a tree loaded with fake sparkling snow.

But in this household and innumerable others, the real Christmas preparation comes down to the cooking of tamales, a culinary custom for La Navidad.

“It’s the tradition,” said Maria Soto, Cortez’s oldest daughter. “When it’s Christmastime, there’s always tamales.”

This family’s tamale tradition dates back generations to the city of Tepic, Mexico, where Cortez learned the recipe as a small girl at her mother’s side.

Back then, the family had no refrigerator, so the women got up at dawn to make tamales. They had to grind the corn for the masa by hand and cook the tamales in pots over a wood stove.

“This is nothing,” Leovijilda Cortez chuckled, gesturing to the pile of still-empty cornhusks. “It was a lot harder then.” Soto and her youngest sister, Marina Cortez, also learned tamale-making from their mother. Despite decades of practice, they still conferred with her as they bustled around the kitchen.

“She’s the captain!” said Soto, 42, with a laugh. “We do what she says.”

Her mother smiled quietly.

“I learned from the women in my family, and now they’re going to pass it down to their children,” said Cortez, 63. “That’s the way it works.”

The two sisters and their families, who live in the same Montebello apartment complex, are playing holiday hosts for the rest of the family, who live around Southern California.

Several kinds of tamales will emerge from this kitchen before they are through: delicate mild and spicy beef ones. Some with chicken and vegetables, others with cheese and jalapeno peppers. Last of all, they will prepare the sweet tamales laced with pineapples, raisins and cinnamon.

Preparations started the night before. Soto boiled large pieces of beef with chopped onion, garlic and nutmeg for two hours. After that, the soft tender meat fell apart with gentle pulls. Early in the morning, she headed over to the nearby bakery to buy 25 pounds of masa packed into bulging plastic bags.

*

Later in the day, she lined up the ingredients on her wooden kitchen table and the three women fell into an easy cadence. They grabbed a supple cornhusk and smoothly spread the masa across one side. The meat and chili went on top, and then with deft folds, they made a small package. The tamales were placed vertically, ready to be simmered in a large pot.

“Every family does theirs differently,” said Marina Cortez, 26. “I don’t know what’s different about ours, but I like them the best.”

The women chatted as they folded, recounting the latest joy and grief in the large family of six sons and four daughters. Leovijilda Cortez gently nagged her youngest daughter about looking for a different job. Marina Cortez teased her older sister about how she used to torment the younger siblings. They recollected with delight how their mother made fresh homemade tortillas for Marina’s third-grade class, stirring envy among all the children.

“It’s all gossip and old memories when we make tamales, because we have all the time in the world,” Marina Cortez said.

After an hour, the folding got tiring. The women shifted from foot to foot, without breaking their tempo.

“Sometimes you just have to take a break,” sighed Marina Cortez, piling one last tamale onto a laden tray.

Her mother carried the heavy stack over to the empty freezer, where she carefully arranged the tamales so they wouldn’t be crushed.

A small batch they put on the stove earlier was ready, sending a steamy, spicy fragrance into the kitchen. Cirrilo Soto, Maria’s father-in-law, slipped into the room and sneaked one off the tab,e. “Mmmmm!” he said, chomping into the soft cornmeal dough. “They’re very good.”

The two younger women have learned some tamale tricks from their mother: how to spread the masa evenly and put the side of the cornhusks with ridges facing outward.

“It was never anything she specifically taught us to do,” Soto said. “We just grew up with it, watching and learning.”

*

Much like the tamale masa, Leovijilda Cortez is the glue that holds this family together. After immigrating from Tepic 34 years ago, she picked strawberries in the fields by San Diego and baby-sat other children while single-handedly raising her 10 children.

Like the masa, her presence is a constant at Christmastime.

“This is what tamale-making is to me: having my mother here,” Soto said. “Without her, it’s nothing. It’s like the tree without a star on top.”

Here, in her daughter’s small kitchen, the quiet matriarch lent years of experience and insight to the Christmas ritual. She added a pinch of salt to the chili mixture, and expertly folded the cornhusks into neat packages that her daughters tried to emulate.

“This is part of my family, part of my childhood,” Leovijilda Cortez said. “No matter what happened, there always were tamales.”