Lima-Style Tamale (Tamal Limeño)

History

A tamal limeño begins where Peruvian cooking meets its oldest staple, maize. Gorriti's recipe treats four pounds of white corn with quicklime and repeated washing until the skins slip away — nixtamalization, the ancient alkaline treatment of maize that underlies the masa of every true tamale. The dough is enriched not with anything native to the Andes but with pork lard and eggs, and filled with a picadillo of pork seasoned with ground ají, hard eggs, tocino, almonds and ground peanuts. Wrapped in corn husks and steamed for two hours, it is, as the recipe says plainly, "este sabroso producto de la cocina criolla en Lima."

The tamale itself is far older than Lima — it originated in Mesoamerica as early as 8000 to 5000 BC, portable maize parcels the Maya and Aztec carried to war and on the road, and its name descends from the Nahuatl tamalli. What reaches Gorriti's page is the coastal-Peruvian branch of that tradition: the tamal criollo of yellow corn and pork, seasoned with ají, set apart from the sweeter Andean huminta of fresh grated choclo — which Gorriti prints on the very next page.

The layering is the point. The corn and its lime-treatment are Indigenous American; the pork, lard and almonds arrived with the Spanish; the result is neither, but the criollo kitchen of Lima, where tamales were long a fixture of street life around the Plaza Mayor.

This is one contributor's receipt, not a treatise — how Josefina del Valle de Chacaltana, whose recipe reached Gorriti from Buenos Aires, made a Lima tamale in the 1880s. Who first married nixtamalized maize to Spanish pork on the Peruvian coast, and by whose hands the criollo tamal took its lasting shape, the recipe does not say, and no source opened here settles it.

Ingredients

• 4 pounds (libras) white corn (maíz blanco)
• a few handfuls cal viva (quicklime)
• a little salt
• plenty manteca de chancho (pork lard)
• 4 eggs
• cooked pork (carne de chancho)
• hard-boiled eggs
• ají molido (ground chili)
• tocino (bacon / cured pork fat)
• ground almonds
• ground maní (peanuts)
• corn husks (hojas de maíz)

Instructions

1. Boil four pounds of white corn in plenty of water with a few handfuls of cal viva (quicklime) to strip away its skin.
2. After it has come to a boil twice, drain the water and turn the corn out into a batea (wooden trough) or any open vessel.
3. Rub and wash the corn repeatedly, in turn, until it is clean of husks, white, and shows no trace of lime.
4. Grind the corn into a masa (dough).
5. Season the masa with a little salt, plenty of manteca de chancho (pork lard), and four eggs, kneading until firm and smooth.
6. Divide the masa into pieces the size the tamales are to be.
7. Fill each piece with a picadillo of cooked pork seasoned with hard-boiled eggs, ground ají (chili), tocino (bacon), and ground almonds and maní (peanuts).
8. Wrap the tamales in corn husks that have been soaked until pliable and washed well.
9. Arrange the wrapped tamales in a pot with a little water, standing them in squares like building a wall.
10. Cover the pot's mouth with a piece of burlap folded in four, then the lid, so the steam aids the cooking.
11. Cook two hours over low heat, adding a little hot water once or twice if the pot's water runs low.
12. After two hours of slow cooking, the tamales are properly done.