Thanks for such an informative article. I loved the photos!

I grew up on Manuel’s hot tamales. I never imagined how a Mexican food could become so popular in a rural area such as the Mississippi Delta without many Mexicans settling there.

My first experience of tamales came from a jar that contained about 8 tamales from a grocery store in Southern Illinois. They were like canned spinach — yuck. Later, in a Chicago grocery store, ladies made homemade pork and chicken tamales, one dozen for $6 or $8, respectively. They were the best I’ve tasted. I suppose they were the Mexican sort with the corn husk. Every tamale since then has been a disappointment. Next time in the Delta, I’ll have to try some of of those listed above. Thanks for the article.

My great-grandmother was famous for her hot tamales in the 1880′s and 90′s. She, along with most other southern farmers, also made her own hominy, which was a Native American recipe as well. Her family came to Louisiana after the Louisiana Purchase and had Cherokee blood even at that time.

I vote for the Native American source. European settlers intermarried with them for hundreds of years and their cultures brought us so many good dishes. As far as I know, tamales, hominy, tomatoes, and that staple of southern life, beans and cornbread (which form a complete protein) all go back to the Native Americans.

I learned about tamales from migrant workers employed by my father on his West Texas cotton farm when I was a preschool girl. Everything was prepared by hand and the tamales were wrapped in a corn husk. My recollection is that the taste varied daily, depending on what the workers had in their stores at any particular time. The Indian angle sounds very likely to me.

Maybe a large part of the answer can be found in the link between New Orleans tamales and Delta ones: the Mexican/Guatemalan versions that I’ve had were wrapped in banana leaves and had green olives and peas in them. They were sweet, not spicy.