Oxford, Miss.- Entrenched in the food traditions of Mississippi is a much-loved masa-and-meat staple the Delta adopted a century ago: tamales.
Yes, tamales, the food that is to Latin America what hot dogs and hamburgers are to the United States. Some locals still don’t know tamales came from another country. They think they were invented in the South.
“The obvious question is how did hot tamales get to the Delta?” says Amy Evans, oral historian for the Southern Foodways Allliance, which sponsored a day-long tour of the Delta’s Tamale Trail.
“One theory is that Mexican migrant workers brought them and shared them with black field workers,” she says. “So we can kind of figure out how they got here, but why have they stayed?”
Evans says the answer is both straightforward and complicated. Part of the reason is attributable to Doe’s Eat Place, owned today by descendents of the Sicilian family that has served food in the Delta since the early 1900s.
Whatever brought a love of hot tamales to the Delta, Dominick “Big Doe” and Mamie Signa met the demand, selling them from their kitchen.
By the mid-1940s, the Signas had a juke joint serving fried fish and chili to blacks in the front while the family still lived in back.
Ironically, as they note on their website (doeseatplace.com) the “carriage” trade arrived by the back door, like segregation in reverse.
In search of more answers, the curious are being bused along the Tamale Trail, which stretches south from the Tennessee state line to Vicksburg.
Ann Cashion came because she’s contemplating somehow adding tamales to her upscale restaurant, Cashion’s Eat Place in Washington, D.C. As a daughter of the Delta, she uses any excuse to come home and be with family. But she also loves tamales.
“I’ve eaten them for as long as I can remember,” she says. “And I’m trying to figure a way I can work them in as a garnish or an appetizer or something. ”
Cashion’s upscale restaurant takes its name from Doe’s. Why “eat place” instead of “restaurant”? That’s one of those intriguing Southern oddities that keeps history in this neck of the woods interesting.
Mississippi restaurateur Glenda Pickle from Kosciusko signed up because she’s thinking about adding tamales to her Old Trace Grill menu.
Over eight hours, we’ll stop at four restaurants in three of the 16 towns where “red hots” are still hand-made and sold for a fraction of what they ought to command.
We’ll learn that Delta tamales are occasionally wrapped in parchment paper, but mostly in corn husks, or “shucks”; that the meat-to-meal ratio is much higher than in the Southwestern version familiar to Coloradans; and that the tamales themselves are smaller, barely an inch in diameter and about 3-4 inches in length.
We ride past soybean, wheat and rice fields toward towns you might never find if you didn’t already know they were there. Sledge. Onward. Bourbon.
Like the best barbecue joints, the Tamale Trail encompasses holes in the wall with plastic forks, as well as restaurants with napkins, stainless flatware, matching chairs and oilcloth tablecloths.
The first stop is Hicks’ World Famous Hot Tamales and More in Clarksdale, which has already been featured on the Food Network.
Betty Hicks abandoned teaching to join her husband, Eugene, in the tamale business more than 30 years ago. The Hickses have parlayed their enterprise into a restaurant with a 300-seat reception hall. Betty Hicks uses beef almost exclusively, sometimes chicken, but hasn’t a clue about making a vegetarian tamale.
As for the recipe, she knows there are 13 spices in the mix, but that’s it.
“My husband is still the only one who touches, seasons and cooks the meat for filling,” Betty Hicks says. “We roll the meat in self-rising white corn meal, wrap them in husks and secure them in bundles of three with long twist ties, much like the ones around loaves of bread in the supermarket. We place the open-ended tamales in a pan, open end up, and simmer them, real slow.”
The tamales have a kick to them, tempered by sweetened tea. Accompanying the tamales are mashed potatoes, coleslaw, saltine crackers, meat sauce and bottled hot sauce.
Welcome to the Deep South, where it is still possible to eat all day and never see anything akin to a vegetable other than slaw.
Betty Terry of Birmingham, Ala., is eating tamales for the first time. She approaches the little packet tentatively, unwraps it and contemplates her first nibble. Then another.
“I like them,” she says, smiling. “But they definitely have a spiciness.”
Looking on bemusedly are Katherine and Richard Tufts from Woodbine, Md., a suburb of Baltimore. This is their first visit to the Delta. Tamales are not easily found in their area.
“They’re more available in the (Washington) D.C. area, says Katherine Tufts. “But the ones here have more meat than meal. The ones we’ve had have been heavy on cornmeal. These are good. Spicy, but good.”
On we ride, past Abe’s, a Lebanese store that sells tamales, and into Clarksdale to Ground Zero Blues Club, co-owned by actor Morgan Freeman and local attorney Bill Luckett. The third annual Juke Joint Festival is in full swing.
Here we eat fried tamales. Remember: If it walks, swims or flies, it can be fried. Anyway, if it’s good enough for Twinkies, why not tamales?
Next: Joe’s Hot Tamale Place in Rosedale, also known as The White Front Cafe. Joe Pope died in 2004, but his sister Barbara, her sisters and their 99-year-old mother, Emma, still sell the product he made famous.
“I don’t know how tamales got (to the Delta) or why they stayed,” Barbara Pope says. “I left here in 1963 and when I came back, everybody was eating tamales.”
Pope started the day with 200 dozen tamales, and had 11 dozen left. When the bus pulled away, she was sold out.
Somehow riders still had room for more at Airport Grocery in Cleveland, where Tamara Calhoun makes tamales according to Joe Pope’s recipe.
It is this preservation of tradition that makes the South so special to so many. Delta Blues musicians are legendary. Books abound on the civil rights movement. But who knew there was a Tamale Trail?
“We wanted to do something to highlight food in our own backyard,” SFA historian Amy Evans says. “Clearly some were in the (tamale-making) business for the bucks, because it was something that generated revenue when people weren’t picking cotton. The more we looked at it, the more we realized the subject was bigger than we thought.”
Staff writer Ellen Sweets can be reached at 303-820-1284 or esweets@denverpost.com.
