In the kitchen at what will soon be Maria Gonzales’s new restaurant in Fort Collins, the chilis were pulverized and the corn husks washed and soaked. Gonzalez donned a colorful, striped apron and rolled up her sleeves to start the day's first batch of Christmas tamales.
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“I’ve already prepared the meat,” she said in Spanish, speaking through a translator. “I cook it with bay leaves, cumin, salt and garlic.”
The meat had been stewing with those flavorings all night in the crock pot.
“Then, once the meat is tender, I add a little red chili,” she said. “It’s delicious.”
Gonzalez is experienced in the art of tamale making. She’s also quick – turning out 60 tamales in less than an hour. But to do that, she needs her sous chefs to pitch in: her husband, Jesus Castro and their 20-year-old daughter, Angela.
“She’ll just have me, like, throw stuff into the mixer,” Angela said. “Honestly, I help in what she needs me. It's always different.”
For many Latino families in Colorado, Christmas food traditions revolve around tamales - stuffed cornmeal patties steamed in corn husks or banana leaves. And the Christmas tamale tradition - the tamalada - isn't just about eating them, but making them together, as a family.
“Making tamales was like a party,” Gonzalez said, recalling the tamaladas of her youth, when cousins and aunts gathered on Christmas Eve in her grandmother's kitchen in Sinaloa, Mexico. “The whole family would get together.”
Her grandmother would prepare the meat ahead of time and everyone would form an assembly line of sorts - some making the masa - the cornmeal dough, others spreading it on the husks. Still others would add the meat filling before handing them off to be neatly folded into a tight package and placed in the steamer.
Everybody would be talking and yelling and laughing all at once. Cousins running around and teasing each other - playing games. By the end, everyone was always covered in flour and bits of dough.
“It was a disaster! Because my grandmother was a perfectionist,” Gonzalez said. “She never liked what we were doing, and her job was to be scolding all of us. We ate the raw dough – and I still like that. It was a game; it wasn't like a chore for us.”
And when Gonzales moved her own young family to Fort Collins 16 years ago, she brought those traditions with her, conscripting her young daughters to gather each year to make Christmas tamales.
“I'm discovering that I became a bit like my grandmother,” Maria said, acknowledging that perfectionism may run in the family. “Because if I saw that (the kids) weren't doing something right, I would take them out of the equation.”
“She didn't like the way that I smeared on the tamal, or how much meat I put in, or she didn't like the way I chopped,” Angela laughed at the memory of those early years. “So, I wasn't allowed to help all that much. I would just sit at the table with my siblings, talking with them. I would just watch them make the food. Now the memory feels very warm. It felt just very loving. It's definitely one of the things that I enjoyed looking back on when my family was all together and when we were all little.”
And now that family tradition has grown into a catering business and restaurant. La Fondita Latina will serve Gonzalez’s homemade tamales, along with burritos, sandwiches and quesadillas when it opens to the public early next year.
In the meantime, Angela, now 20, has finally grown into her mother’s high standards. She was the one tasked with making the masa for that batch of Christmas tamales made on pre-order for their many customers.
She started the process by creaming a quart of lard - by hand - in a large bowl, before adding cornmeal flour and broth just a little bit at a time as she mixed and kneaded.
The family formed a line, with Gonzales spreading the masa on the corn husks, Angela adding the meat, and Castro folding the packages, placing each tamale gently in a large, metal steamer.
Tamales are simple in concept, yet labor intensive to make, which is why they’ve become a Christmas specialty: they are food for a crowd, a cheap way to feed a large family gathering. But they’re not an everyday food because it takes a crowd of helpers to make them efficiently.
And after many generations of this tradition, Castro said Christmas tamales were part of the culture.
“My grandmother made tamales and she would tell me how her mother made tamales before her,” he said. “You could say that a taste for tamales is in our genes because we come from the culture of corn.”
After about three hours of steaming, the tamales would be ready.
Gonzalez, Castro and their daughter would be making hundreds over the course of a couple of days. And on Christmas Eve, families around Fort Collins would unwrap each tamale like a little holiday present containing a taste of home.
