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If you're not fortunate enough to be Mexican, or to at least have married into a Mexican family, you may be on the outside of Christmas' most delicious tradition. Like, you may not have placed your holiday tamale order from your wife's cousin's girlfriend's mom in the first week of November, and now you might be a last-minute shopper for meat-filled masa while the clock winds fatefully toward Three Kings’ Day.
Traditionally, the Christmas tamale procedure is about, well, tradition – family, togetherness, and the type of overdoing-it nourishment that we all realize is the true spirit of the holidays once we move beyond commercialism and a very fat man plundering chimneys. And specifically it’s about the tamalada, the tamal-making fete that is the Mexican ritual of the family women gathering in the kitchen, as in pre-Columbian times, rife with “because this is what we do” rationality, to make something to be eaten throughout the holidays. From core family dinners to las Posadas (nativity scene reenactments) to sprawling open house gatherings, to, if you’re like us, drunken late-night food-and-salsa binges under blinking holiday lights, by the fire, spent wistfully pondering how grandma, or aunt, or a distant sort-of-relative’s mother, could have done so much work.
And what work it is. Or so we’re told. Part intergenerational family reunion, part holiday warm-up, and part caloric assembly line, often presided over by a matriarchal figure, the tamalada eventually yields a portable festival food that recalls an Aztec spirit of generosity. Or a batch of moveable warrior rations fit for extended battle. It’s all dependent on how you view your history.
Either way, who is anybody without a grandmother’s tough kitchen work? While Rick Bayless once proclaimed “I don’t have a Mexican grandmother, so I can appreciate all Mexican grandmothers,” clearly we’re not in the business of ranking abuelas. At least not in print. And while we’ve also been told that tamales are a homemade foodstuff, that commercial calories could never replicate the inherent love necessary for the 24-hour cooking binges these torpedoes require, here’s a take on some local spots to at least get a quick fix. To get a plastic bag heavy with joy-filled cornhusks, handily transportable, easily re-warmable, bursting with said love, and, hopefully, shredded pork. And to get a taste of the most delicious and festive way to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Or, really, just to celebrate living. By eating too much Mexican food throughout December and into the New Year.
Christmas cookies are bad for your blood sugar anyway.
5. JC King's
3128 S. 13th St.
(414) 389-5627
On paper, or laminated grease-resistant menu, or on TV when Anthony Bourdain eats a “mother in law” on Chicago’s south side, a tamal torta appears as a slightly nauseating, completely Americanized, pasta-bread-bowl type of gut punch. You could actually say the same for much at JC King’s, where there are hot dogs aplenty and even the décor is a bit vomitous. But the guajolota is the name of a traditional Mexico City sandwich, where one tamal hides inside a bolillo roll in a carbohydrate conglomeration. We take starch-on-starch as a sort of challenge to our salsa pouring hand. As if the thing itself is defying you to drown its grainy texture. Here, of course, they go with three tamales per sandwich. And it’s a neat variation. You can get shredded chicken mixed with verde sauce, or a queso and pepper combo that bursts magma-ish cheese goo delectably. Either probably could have been made last week. No matter – they are served browned and crisped on the outter masa, running perfectly counter to the greasy, mushy bun. So it’s set up just right to be doused and smothered in creamy jalapneo sauce, or the mango habanero, each with pleasant kick and plenty of bread to stick to. Or just go ahead and get the thing dressed, exorbitantly, like they do with tortas here, in the standard beans, mayo, lettuce, tomatoes, onion, avocado, jalapeno schmear. In Mexico, this double-breaded bastard is popular as a lunchtime snack from a street vendor. Meaning, maybe you’re already on your feet, and it’s still early, so there will be time to work it all off. Do the same, enjoy yourself – you’ll have time in the New Year to be a different, less fat, person.
4. Berta's Tamales
1023 S. Cesar E Chavez Dr.
(414) 975-5410
Amidst the bumping tuba pop, a reverberating pulse that seems to come from the very street itself along Cesar Chavez near National, is a colorful food truck, flagpoles long and erect and gaudily announcing the eponymous foodstuff like it was a car dealership. But there is nothing slick about Berta’s aside from the cook’s flattop chopping skills. In fact, Berta herself is pure honey. Taking your order for a pambazo (“con papas?”) with a smile, she is as sweet as the dulce, or, yes, dessert, take on the tamale. This is a saccharine, strawberry-ish, soaked-through corn capsule that comes on a bit like a warm, mushy creamsicle. And it’s probably the most indicative of Berta’s own style, which could well be described as masa forward. Each of the three types here – try the pork or chicken before the sweet, of course, like Roger Waters told you – is actually in something like a double wall of the stuff, like she’s trying to build a pillowy fortress around the filling. It can be frustrating with the pork, where it’s almost hard to get to the moist slicks that are the texture of a saucy Southern-style pulled pig. It’s salty and deeply meaty, and the fork work, of course, ends up being worth it. Especially when you coat the carb-y beast with a hit of the dangerously spicy chile de arbol salsa. With a sweat-inducing zing, good hearty texture, this is a sauce tremendous on a bare bones taco, or anything with salty chorizo. But, here, one should definitely let at least one tamal shine as a delicious, porky sponge.
3. El Rey
Multiple locations
The old standby, El Rey has become impossibly ubiquitous, so much so that even a roving Santa bike brigade was stopped en masse on a recent Saturday afternoon, garnering sustenance from the bustling in-store taqueria on Cesar Chavez. It’s actually so well-know and widespread throughout Milwaukee we’ve recently come to ask: Is it even good? Or are people just accepting, comfortable with the known commodity? To answer we suggest a full, tin-foiled tamale bundle, wrapped with a bow, under the tree for an out-of-town relative. Let someone on the outside offer perspective to make you remember our everyday meal potential. It’s almost too simple to appreciate: tight, compact torpedoes of shreddy red chili pork, smartly seasoned, neatly wrapped, rightly ratio-ed, easily devourable. The beef works too. Or bean, if you want to be a Scrooge about it. Really anything, such is the feel when you open a full pack and the impossible bounty comes pouring forth like sugar plums, or whatever the comparatively useless foodstuff is that Santa supposedly carries about.
But what sets our favorite friendly grocer apart: the endless options therein to kick everything up a notch, or 10. For our money there’s little better than the house sofrito – a creamy onion-garlic-pepper slick that is impossible to stop adding, until, sometimes, you’re pretty much just eating it like a soup. Or, you could get crazy, as we did recently, and gamble on that glass jar of neon orange San Pedro habanero sauce. It burns from the tip all the way down, lingers, and might well come back to visit you the next day – like the ghost of great lunches past. So, like much at El Rey, this is not a sauce for the faint of intestine. But neither are holiday gatherings with every single one of your family members under one roof. Be bold. Life is for living.
2. Taqueria Buenavista
6000 W. Burnham St.
(414) 546-1197
Sometimes we go grocery shopping when the cupboards are already full – it often just feels like the best excuse to hit the Taqueria Buenavista truck parked regularly outside of Piggly Wiggly in Bay View. And likewise we recently found ourselves barreling away from the lake, deep into West Allis even, for a sit-down stop at the brick-and-mortar home of our favorite greasy tacos. Here, like many places this side of the border, the Good View has mastered the not-so-subtle art of suizo-ing. Or covering a Mexican foodstuff in sauce and melty cheese. Or, in other words, taking something great and making it better, fatter, richer, more satisfying. Here the tamale suizos come in the proper pork varietal, lined inside with simple red sauce, bathed liberally in a glistening verde wash, then topped with hot, white queso shards. You could almost ignore the impossibly creamy, lardy refrieds on the side. And the same could be said for any salsa – if the best here weren’t one of the tops in town. Try as we might, the help has tight lips with what all goes on in the jalapeno cream sauce. How they get that creamy consistency remains a mystery. Is it an emulsification? What is an emulsification? But one should take the plunge regardless, and sauce those already saucy tamales even more. It all ends as a spicy, soupy, masa mush, with inundated shreddy pork the end reward at the bottom of the heaping plate. Suizo apparently just means Swiss, and is used as an adjective for something covered with cream or cheese. Well, alright. We just know that to go all in here, with a full-on holiday hangover especially, is to find this sort of cooking methodology up there with Roger Federer, neutrality, and chocolate as that country’s great contributions to society.
1. La Casa de Alberto
624 W. National Ave.
(414) 643-5715
When chef Alberto Gonzalez left Conejitos, it was probably because he wanted to get away from the Margaritaville masses. The House of Alberto is still gringo central, they might push lettuce and tomatoes in your tacos, there's some steaming fajitas, frozen margaritas, gabachos really into the Bucks game on TV, and waitresses quick to call you “honey” in an act of contrived homeliness. There is also that same nuts and bolts menu featuring quite heavily seasoned and salted food. But here it’s actually all rather satisfying. And on weekends there is one kind of tamale – the truest kind – that our bartender was thrilled we even asked about on a recent Friday.
Here we have tender, moist chunks of spiced pork, inside a thick-ish, moist wall of masa, with a hefty layer of smoky sauce lining proceedings. They have a fall-apart butteriness, which in some, apparently, surprisingly, reveal the slightest dribble of gooey, melty Oaxacan cheese. There’s a pervasive lard-and-love quality, and just-right meat-to-corn ratios that almost make that salsa – of the three table varietals, the deep red chipotle one is the standout, with a pre-ban bowling alley smokiness – unnecessary. Almost. There’s also a tingly arbol-based offering, the ying and yang between the two perfect for alternating bites.
Overall, this is kind of a shockingly perfect package. It’s hard not to ponder: for all the crowd-pleasing hoopla wrought by Conejitos through the years, now their offspring has given us a glimpse of at-home, inner-sanctum, Mexican kitchen tradition. Maybe Christmas miracles do exist.
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