tamalitos de chipilin

Tamalitos de chipilin. When you mention to your boyfriend’s mama that someone’s going to teach you to make them, she tells you she could make them in her sleep. You both laugh, but a tiny jet of egotistical aspiring master chef rage shoots into your brain, makes you grip the counter with a white-knuckled intensity. You will learn tamalitos. You will learn them so well you will also be able to make them in your sleep, and more of them. Double. Triple, maybe.

Wednesday morning is game day. You race down from breakfast into the school kitchen only to be told by the cooks that the chipilin nor the hojas have arrived. They also laugh a little at your expense because you are clearly very excited (no one gets this excited about tamalitos) and because you are sweating profusely. You also laugh, and think of how stupid you are for wearing a sweater, in summer, to make tamalitos in a steamy kitchen.

NOTE: tamalitos are not the same as tamales are not the same as paches. But maybe they are, because you’re not really sure what differentiates one from the next just yet. At the very least you know that if it only has chipilin or frijo il, and is steamed in a plantain leaf, t’s a tamalito. Also tamales blancos come with pepian and are only plain masa steamed in corn husks. Also you eat paches, filled with spicy-ish chicken, on Thursdays. Also for Navidad you can have sweet tamales with chocolate and raisins, though lastima about the raisins.

So you come back a half hour later and the hojas and chipilin are there, and you begin to pluck the leaves off of the stems of chipilin. Mayra, the head chef, tells you to smell them; they remind you of clover. They are soft and delicately aromatic and you think that if you were a rabbit you would only eat chipilin, ever. You both tear the large plantain leaves in half and save the stems to layer in the bottom of the giant olla, making a kind of natural steamer. You chat and watch her as she mixes corn flour with salt, then water, then vegetable oil (some of the kids don’t like lard. Again, lastima) and finally blocks of queso fresco. She tells you the proper tamalito consistency is on the watery side, that if the masa is tough going into the leaf then it will be even tougher coming out.

Finally (finally!!!!) Mayra asks you if you’re ready to help wrap. She shows you, slowly and with lots of accompanying verbal explanation, how to fold a handful of dough into a leaf. You try and immediately fuck up. She shows you again and you fuck that one up, too. This proves to be a pattern for the next ten or so tamales, but afterward that you kind of start to get it. Side scoop of the hand into masa; lay it on one side of the leaf; bring both sides together and roll down OR wrap one side over the other; then back end down and under, upper end also under. You occasionally refold or try to sneakily add extra leaves to patch the holes where masa spurts put of . You turn out one tamalito for every five of Mayra’s, but she is kind and tells you to keep going, that it’s only a matter of practice.

You drop by, casually, at lunch time later in the day to say hello. You are ever so pleasantly surprised when Mayra offers you a freshly steamed tamalito de chipilin. Unwrap it (you can’t remember ever having been so careful with the leaves) – all damp and shiny, flecked with the dark of the cooked chipilin – take a bite, all vaguely cheesy, salty, chewy-with-give, feels-like-home-even-though-it’s-foreign goodness; see clearly into a possible future, a very possible future, where you’re killin it with the tamalitos, even in your sleep. 

When you move to Guatemala and try to figure out how to cook you perceive that:

There is a right way to cook things. There is a wrong way to cook things.

The right way to cook things means: una olla de presión for your beans; a gigantic metal juicer for your citrus.

The wrong way means: less garlic in your salsa (porque PICA); no cumin in your beans; refusing to acknowledge that cilantro and culantro are the same thing, even after you research and discover that while they are in fact different plants you can request una mano de CUlantro at the market and receive cilantro).

Things learned: that you can picar una cebolla by sticking your knife all which ways into just a sliver around the top and then slicing, carefully, gently towards your finger, and that onion shards will drop onto your cutting board like tiny, wet diamonds; that you can get three piñas for 10 Q at el Mayoreo; that limones yield significantly (surprisingly) more juice when the sides are sliced, rendering the spherical, cubic; that a licuadora is life; that for a good chirmol you should char the tomatoes a bit before chopping them; that you cannot apagar the fuego of the parilla before you echar the platanos. You MUST grill platanos (may you always remember in shame the time you threw water on the painstakingly cultivated fire, only to have to return to the table and see the pity, the disappointment on the faces of the Guatemalans still at the table).

Thoughts changed when: you talk to a woman who tells you que piensa que, más que todo, la cocina es para experimentar, para inventar, para no tener miedo, para siempre echar mucho ajo – the affirmation you feel almost defies description. You think it’s no coincidence that her food is some of the best you’ve had since coming here. The do’s and don’ts that in your most unsure, panic-stricken moments seemed so ironclad – these soften, they give way.

And the miscellaneous: you also did not know that you would become adept at making guacamol, or that the idea of a day without eating frijoles now seems unimaginable/impossible, or that you who once scorned bread (fool.) would relish the ritual of café con pan dulce, a meal in its own right with no fixed hour. That you would come to appreciate tortillas bought at exactly the right moment, so as to still be hot when you unwrap them from their cloth-covered stack on the table.