Food traditions
Sparkly sweet corn cookies
These cookies, inspired by the tamales my friend brings me every Christmas, bring some bling to the holidays
I don’t like to lie to my children, I really don’t. Lying is wrong, plus I have never been able to keep my own stories straight. So what do I do when my little ones ask me if Santa is real? I say yes. I know, many of you would say that this response constitutes lying. But I love seeing my kids’ excitement on Christmas Eve when they leave a plate of cookies for Santa, along with a handwritten note and a drawing. It won’t last long, their belief in Santa, and I want to hold onto this innocent part of their childhood for as long as I can.
Santa’s cookies usually include a combination of store-bought and homemade. The holidays bring out everyone’s inner baker. Some families have traditional recipes handed down through the generations. For others, it may be as simple as slicing and baking pre-made refrigerated cookie dough. Some communities host elaborate cookie exchanges, and this can lead to the establishment of temporary cookie-baking sweatshops in previously peaceful kitchens. Baking Christmas cookies is all about sharing and tradition, and a whole lot of butter, sugar and flour.
Instead of baking cookies for Christmas, the Mexican tradition is to make and share tamales. It’s a laborious task best shared by many hands, and what better excuse is there to sit around for hours sharing gossip? The traditional Christmastime tamale-making party is known as a tamalada navideña. My fellow SKC enthusiast, Gavin Fritton, shared an excellent depiction of the tamale-making gatherings in his family. In Mexico and in other parts of Latin America, tamales are eaten throughout the year, but they have a special place during the Christmas season. They are traditionally eaten during the religious rituals known as posadas, the reenactments of Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem that take place in the nine days leading up to Christmas Eve. They are also eaten on Epiphany, or El Dia de Reyes, which follows Christmas.
For years, I’ve been the enthusiastic recipient of a one-way Christmas tamale exchange with my Mexican-America neighbor, Teresa. You may remember her from when I wrote about her recipe for the best rice pudding on Earth. In addition to being honorary Abuela to my girls and an ever-ready and experienced source of advice, Teresa is a wonderful cook of homestyle Mexican food. It’s hard to be grumpy when the doorbell rings before 8 o’clock on a Sunday morning when it’s Teresa, bearing a piping hot plate of just-cooked chilaquiles. And that’s on an ordinary day.
Every Christmas, she cooks up dozens of tamales, both savory and sweet. Savory tamales, such as the ones Teresa fills with pork in a red chile sauce, are the kind most available in restaurants. In Mexico and other parts of Latin America, the variety of fillings is infinite. They may contain meat, chiles, cheese, vegetables and any combination thereof. The sweet ones, called tamales de dulce, are less common, and can be as simple as an unfilled sweetened corn tamale, or perhaps studded with plump, juicy raisins. Sweet tamales, the kind we can’t buy even at our local tamale specialist, San Francisco’s Roosevelt Tamale Parlor, are my favorite. When we get our bags of tamales from Teresa, we know what we’re having for dinner and dessert.
The tradition of making and eating tamales is alive and robust in 2010, but tamales have been around for a long time. Historians trace their origins to Mesoamerica as early as 8000 to 5000 BCE, popular at the time of the Aztec and Maya civilizations. The essence of a tamale is its ground corn filling, called masa, milled from limewater-treated corn, or hominy. The ground, dried corn is combined with lard and broth or water to make a dough, which is then filled and wrapped in a corn husk (or sometimes a banana leaf) before being steamed. This is the basis for both savory and sweet varieties. Sweet corn tamales, tamales de elote, capture the flavor of a fresh ear of corn without the distraction of other tastes.
For my Christmas cookie this year, I decided to try to encapsulate the essence of a sweet corn tamale into a cookie. Teresa and my little tasters were ecstatic with the result, which tastes something like a corn muffin but better, because it’s a cookie. These have chewy centers and crisp edges, to satisfy both camps of cookie eaters. To gild this lily, I’ve rolled the edges in golden sugar, pretty enough to decorate a Christmas tree, and special enough to leave for Santa.
Sparkly sweet corn cookies
Ingredients
- ¾ cup all-purpose flour
- 1 cup corn flour — I used Bob’s Red Mill brand, which is found in many supermarkets. (Do not confuse with corn meal, masa or corn starch)
- ½ teaspoon baking powder
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 1½ sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 1 cup sugar
- 2 large eggs
- ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
- garnish: golden yellow sanding (coarse) sugar
Directions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- Sift first four dry ingredients together.
- In a separate bowl, cream butter until soft, then add sugar and beat until fluffy. Add in eggs, one at a time, and then add vanilla.
- Combine wet and dry ingredients into a soft dough. Spread dough onto a sheet of plastic wrap, then roll into a 12-inch log (about 2 inch diameter). Chill wrapped dough log in refrigerator until firm, at least 4 hours.
- After dough has been chilled, sprinkle work surface with sanding sugar. Unwrap chilled dough log and roll several times in sanding sugar to coat.
- Slice coated dough log into 1/2 inch slices. Place dough slices onto ungreased baking sheets, sprinkle with additional sanding sugar if desired, and bake for 12-15 minutes until edges are golden. Cool completely.
Today’s must-see viral videos
Watch: The contested winners of annual hot dog eating contest, robots as second-class citizens, and more
I am robot, hear me roar. 1. 365 days of makeup
”Natural Beauty” answers that burning question once and for all, “What would you look like if you put on a year’s worth of makeup all at once?”
2. “District 9″ … with robots
Continue Reading CloseDrew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.
Our government’s terrifying food ads
New exhibit reveals the twisted logic of the Department of Agriculture's marketing department through the years
Government's attempts to explain healthy pig diet through motivational poster goes awry. There’s nothing more appetizing than giving human characteristics to the food you’re about to eat. That’s why we always see pictures of pigs with bibs on at rib houses; because for some horrible reason we feel better about eating Porky if we convince ourselves he’s a cannibal.
I always wondered where that strange impulse came from, and now thanks to a new exhibit, “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” at the National Archives, I think I know. The New York Times ran a piece yesterday about the show, which focuses on posters, videos and other media from the Department of Agricultural, spanning all the way back to the revolutionary war.
Continue Reading CloseDrew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.
The five most ridiculous defenses of Ronald McDonald
A watchdog group is calling for the clown mascot's retirement, but is being creepy grounds for firing?
Who wouldn't accept food from this guy? McDonald’s is under attack again for force-feeding our nation’s children greasy, delicious fries. A group called Corporate Accountability International took out full-page ads today in several prominent newspapers, titled “Doctor’s Orders: Stop Marketing Junk Food to Children.“
And while this grievance might not seem new, exactly, CAI is launching another campaign on Thursday against Ronald McDonald himself, whom the watchdog group called a “Deep Fried Joe Camel.” They claim Ronald’s the equivalent of a drug pusher for MSG-addicted kids.
Continue Reading CloseDrew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.
Is it racist to ban shark’s fin soup?
All three West Coast states may eliminate the Chinese delicacy, but is it pro-environment, or anti-Asian?
Sandbar shark, one of the preferred species for fins My Chinese grandfather was well into the latter part of his life when he made some money. He’d brought his children up on bowls of white rice with soy sauce and maybe a little pat of lard if he was feeling flush. And so, when it was time to feed his grandchildren, he loved that he could feed them the good stuff, the expensive stuff. I remember him being happy to see my grade school straight-A report cards, but the grins he showed me then were dwarfed by the supernova smiles he’d flash when I ate with him, precociously enjoying shark’s fin soup and other delicacies cousins my age were studiously avoiding at the kids’ table. And so I wonder what he’d think of the movement to ban shark’s fin.
Continue Reading CloseFrancis Lam is Features Editor at Gilt Taste, provides color commentary for the Cooking Channel show Food(ography), and tweets at @francis_lam. More Francis Lam.
Toys that really cooked
Turns out you can create a whole dinner menu based on foods made by toys. So we did. Bon appetit!
With the sad-making news last week that the Easy-Bake Oven as we know it will be going to the Great Incinerator in the Sky, we here at Salon Food started reminiscing over our own toy food memories. There were the Easy-Bake knockoff Chuck E. Cheese pizza ovens, there were the heartbreakingly dear Snoopy Sno Cones, there were the furiously lame Queasy-Bake Cookerator Dip n’ Drool Dog Bones.
It wasn’t long, then, before Aviva Shen, editorial fellow extraordinaire, realized that you could put together a whole menu of toy-made foods: “Basically,” she said, looking at dozens of Easy-Bake bootlegs, including one that grilled hamburgers, “if a child had to survive on toy oven food alone, they could do it … though they would quickly develop diabetes.”
Bah! A small price to pay for self-reliance! And probably no more dangerous than giving hormone-charged 17-year-olds keys to thousands of pounds of rocketing steel. (Probably.) So we scoured history to find the finest play-date victuals. Please, sit back and enjoy our menu of toy-made foods.
Francis Lam is Features Editor at Gilt Taste, provides color commentary for the Cooking Channel show Food(ography), and tweets at @francis_lam. More Francis Lam.
Page 1 of 10 in Food traditions