You may have eaten humble pie, but ashes?
Possibly not, unless you ran into tamales de ceniza (ash tamales) in Mexico.
In the state of Guerrero, where I tasted them, tamale-makers boil dried corn with an equal quantity of ashes, then let the cooked corn stand with the ashes to absorb the flavor. Next, they rinse the corn well to eliminate the ashes. Then they grind it into masa.
In the old days, women searched in the fields for a special type of wood that would give the flavor they wanted, said María del Carmen Ramírez de González of Carmelitas restaurant in Zihuatanejo, on the coast of Guerrero.
To rinse out the ashes after cooking, she said, they put the corn in a basket and swirled it in a river.
The woman who sells tamales de ceniza in the Zihuatanejo municipal market (above) said she doesn't use wood but something else. I couldn't quite get what she meant, but it sounded like something related to the coconut--and lots of those grow in Zihuatanejo.
María Olga Islas Sánchez, from Vallecitos de Zaragoza in Guerrero, told me that women in her area use a type of oak called encino.
And Julian Rivas, who is from Teloloapan, Guerrero, said cooks there would get the ashes from whatever wood they burned to heat their comal (griddle). Ash that has turned white is especially prized, he says.
Today, tamales de ceniza are cooked in a steamer, but in the past, they were steamed in a pot of water, set on pieces of corn cob or banana leaf stems to keep them above the water. This type of tamal is wrapped in banana leaves or fresh corn leaves, not dried corn husks.
Unlike fluffy tamales filled with meat or cheese, tamales de ceniza are flat and solid, with no filling or sauce. You eat them as an accompaniment to mole or other dishes, a sort of pre-Hispanic flat bread.
Fascinating story. Did you like those tamales?
Posted by: Faye | September 23, 2012 at 06:53 PM