There are foods that fill you.
And there are foods that gather you.
Tamales do both.
I have long carried a quiet fascination with corn and tamales. Each time I am in Mexico, my friends order them instinctively. Steam rises. Husks peel back. The scent arrives, carrying with it something ancient, something steady.
That curiosity followed me home.
One winter afternoon in Brooklyn, I stood in front of a small tamales shop. Nothing grand. For me, it was a revelation. Not because it was new — but because it felt old, familiar before I tasted it.
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Tamales reach back more than 7,000 years to the domestication of maize. Among the Mexica, tamalli — meaning “wrapped” — were ceremonial and sustaining. Corn was sacred. It was primal. To make a tamal today is to honor its humble heritage.
By preparing dried corn with an alkaline solution from wood ash, the Aztecs discovered a way to soften the kernel’s outer skin, making it easier to digest and to grind into flour for a pliable masa (dough). The process, called nixtamalization, is still used to make masa flour — the key ingredient in Mexican essentials like tortillas and tamales.
A simple masa of flour and warm water is whipped light with fat and salt, spread onto corn husks or banana leaves, filled, folded, and steamed.
Born of a patient presence that knows, “good things come to those who wait,” traditional tamales take time to make. Tamalería La Madrina fulfills that wisdom. Owner Artemio Baltazar left Hidalgo in the 1990s carrying memory, more than luggage.
“We didn’t have much,” he says softly. “But we had tamales, mostly vegetarian and when we had money beef or pork.”
They sat on the floor — cousins, neighbors, large, steaming pots of tamales — happy in their simplicity.
He met Marisol Lopez while she was running a quesadilla stand in Hidalgo. She learned to cook from her mother, who, at 104, still stirs and seasons by instinct. Their shop, which bears the grandmother’s nickname “La Madrina,” makes everything fresh daily — tamales wrapped in banana leaves, mole simmered for hours with bright tomatillos and smoky chiles, and then, of course, the guajolota.
The Guajolota
A freshly steamed banana-leaf tamal — masa whipped with rendered pork fat and sea salt, filled with salsa verde chicken, rajas con queso, mole, or red chile pork — is unwrapped while still hot.
A bolillo roll is sliced and gently warmed — not toasted. The crust stays crisp, the interior soft.
The tamal is placed directly inside.
There is no extra sauce or other embellishment. The seasoned masa and filling melt slightly into the bread, becoming one cohesive bite. It is eaten by hand, often with champurrado (Mexican hot chocolate), warming the other.
Corn that remembers
The guajolota is collaborative and accommodating — corn meeting wheat, Indigenous technique meeting colonial bread. It stretches, sustains, comforts. It is breakfast for laborers, students, and dreamers.
It is also a memory you can hold.
Standing there in Brooklyn, unwrapping steam into wintery air, I understood.
A tamale is humble — corn and filling, folded and steamed.
Yet, inside it lives migration. Inside it lives Hidalgo. Inside it lives a grandmother still cooking at 104.
It is corn that remembers.
Tamalería La Madrina is located at 735 Nostrand Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11216
