TAMALES

Where did they come from, how did they wind up in a glass jar and where did they go?

            Once again we have to look back to get the true story of tamales. We have to go back eight or ten thousand years when Andy Aztec was really getting tired of the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches his wife Emma always fixed for him to take on his hunting trips.

            He came home from one of those hunting trips and threw a flamingo down on the table and told her to chop it up and make him something different for the next hunt.

            Emma had a crock full of masa, a starchy dough that she was going to make pancakes with. (I have already told you enough about pancakes) She chopped up the flamingo added some onions and spices and rolled it up in the masa. Then she wrapped the whole thing in a corn husk and steamed it.

            She packed several of them into his lunch pouch the next time he went hunting. When he returned he gave Emma a big kiss and a swat on the behind telling her that the flamingo tarts were delicious but that the coating on them was hard to chew and almost indigestible. She told him that the corn husk was supposed to be removed before eating.

            “That is a great idea, it will make them so much better. What do you call them?” he asked. “So’s I can tell the guys.”

            She thought about if for a minute. The Aztec word, tamalii, came to mind.   It meant “wrapped food.” They are called “Tamales.” she smiled.

            The Derby company put them up in glass jars because eight of them fit perfectly and they looked good.

            The company name possibly is associated with the Kentucky Derby.  The Tamale is the dish that best embodies "the backside" of the Derby, where all those that work with the horses live and work. Most of them are from Central America, and due to the migratory nature of the job and a lack of kitchen access, they rely on hot plates and crockpots to re-create their traditional cuisine.

            When I was a kid, the Derby glass jars of tamales were readily available There were always a couple of jars in the pantry. Ready to be popped open for lunch or a late night snack. You just heated them up and unrolled them on top a piece of rye bread and  added some horse radish.

            I haven’t seen any of those glass jars around for quite some time but recently my wife visited a specialty market out in Hartwell and brought home two “cans” of Derby Tamales. There were eight of them in each can, just like the jars used to hold. They were delicious.

            Later my wife looked more closely at those cans. The tamales we had were packed around the beginning of this century but they didn’t make us sick. So let’s hear it for preservatives.

            Derby went out of business about the time they canned those tamales so no mo tamales.

            Oh sure, all the Mexican restaurants serve tamales but they are big round things in real corn husks with real mixtures of fresh ground meat, vegetables and spices. They aren’t any thing like those paper wrapped, cornmeal covered, mystery stuffed beauties we used to get from a glass jar.

            If you are as old as I am you might remember, during the thirties, the Molly Man at Eighth and State. He stood at his cart beside the bank building and sold hot tamales. “Molly, Molly, Hot Tomale, get em while dere hot Tomale,” He would sing.

            It was always a treat, the nights my Dad would close the bar early and take me down to see the Molly Man. His tamales were a lot like the glass jar kind, but way better.   

            

Fun Food Facts and Fables by the Grumpy Gourmet

This morning I cooked up some pancakes. I’m good at pancakes, but this morning I was using some batter that I had prepared a couple of days ago and stored in the refrigerator. My batter had thickened so I added a little milk (secret – never put water into a pancake batter) and, of course, got it too thin.

There is an old saying that the first pancake never turns out right. Well, I fried three of them and none turned out right. They were the ugliest mishmash of pancakes you have ever seen, but they were still delicious. As I may have said earlier, I’m good at pancakes.

As I sat there eating them I got to wondering how pancakes came to be and decided to write the history of pancakes. If you have ever read anything I have written, you are probably aware that I am not big on research so, of course, I didn’t look anything up. I just went to my computer and started writing.

THE HISTORY OF PANCAKES

Way back, thirty or forty thousand years ago (apologies to any of you “Creationists” out there), Alley Oop—wait, I’d best I change that, the name is probably still under copyright. I will start over.

About thirty or forty thousand years ago, a cave man named Biff was out with the gang hunting for an Azendohsaurus. These beasts were big and had a lot of meat on them. They were also rather stupid, very small brains for the size of them. And they were pretty slow, easy prey for the hunters.

Unfortunately, there weren’t any around so Biff and the boys had a bad day.

Agnes, Biff’s wife, or I guess she would be considered his mate since marriage hadn’t been invented yet, had been out foraging and gathering. She had laid some cattails and ferns and other green stuff out on a rock while she thought about what to do with it.

When Biff returned he was angry and frustrated with the results of the hunt. When Agnes asked him how his day went, he went into a frenzy and took a swing at her with his club. Agnes had been in this kind of predicament before and she was very agile. She ducked and Biff missed, only to take out his frustration on the gatherings on the rock. He beat and beat on them, pulverizing everything there. He threw down his club, and as was his solution to almost any problem, he took a nap.

Agnes looked at the powdered heap and knew that they were desperate for something to eat so she gathered up the dusty ingredients from the rock and added a little water. (Cows and goats hadn’t been invented yet and dinosaurs were hard to milk, so using water in this case was acceptable.)

Agnes was a lot smarter than Biff, females had always been smarter than males, but males were bigger and stronger and did their best to keep the females subservient. This attitude prevailed for a long time so women just smiled inwardly and kept their silence.

Biff and Agnes always kept a fire going in their cave. It was a necessity. It kept them warm and kept critters out of the place. Agnes was the very first person to consider cooking something on it.

She found a nice flat rock and lodged it over the fire, as soon as it was good and hot she poured the mixture of the powder and water on it. The batter settled into little round blobs and when they started bubbling, she flipped them over using a spatula that she had earlier carved out of tree limb.

The result was a bunch of little, brown round things, almost a hundred of them that she immediately named Flat Eddies after her eldest son.

She added a little wild honey and called Biff. He tried one and roared. Biff was not overly articulate but she knew that he liked them. 

He gobbled down over half of them, smiled and went back to bed. Agnes ate a few and she thought they were good too—a relief after eating so much raw meat. She smiled and started to clean up as women were want to do for centuries to come.

By the time Biff and Agnes passed on, the Eddie Cake had found popularity among those early people. It was already being called by many different names but became a supplement to their early diet either as a side dish to their dinosaur steaks or, in hard times, their only source of sustenance.

But the pancake didn’t stop here in the Stone Age, its popularity continued. As civilization progressed, their popularity grew. Greeks and Romans ate pancakes, sweetened with honey just like early man ate them.

During the Elizabethan era the chefs of the time added spices, rosewater, wines, and fruit, and they were especially favored on Shrove Tuesday, a day of feasting and partying before the beginning of Lent. The church, realizing the evils of anything so delicious and objecting to Shrove Tuesday being popularly called Pancake Day, created mandates.

The populace knew that pancakes were a good way to use up perishables like eggs, milk, and butter, and they were delicious so the mandates were mostly ignored.

Pancakes had a lot of different names and there were a lot of different recipes. In colonial America they were known as hoe cakes, johnnycakes, or flapjacks and were made with buckwheat or cornmeal and served with a generous helping of molasses.

Thomas Jefferson really liked pancakes. His French chef, Etienne Lemaire, made his pancakes by pouring dollops of thin batter into a hot pan. The result was what Lemaire called

“panne-quaiques” and are what we would call crepes.

Whatever they are called, they are little, round, flat hunks of fried dough that have been around since Agnes threw batter on a hot, flat rock. And the key word is flat. “Flat as a pancake,” is an old saying. I once tried to make round puffy pancakes and they just were not as good.

BLACK COW PANCAKES

Ingredients

2oz plain flour    

Pinch of salt    

1 medium egg    

3 oz milk 

3oz root beer (crème soda, preferably Dr. Browns, may be substituted)

Oil, for frying   

Powdered sugar    

Ice cream   

 Directions

 Put flour into a bowl and stir in the salt.  Lightly beat together the egg and liquid. Pour over the flour mixture, a little at a time. Whisk it well, into a smooth a smooth pancake batter.

Heat a frying pan and very lightly grease the base of it with a piece of paper napkin dipped in oil. Pour a thin layer of batter into the pan.  Cook until it starts to bubble and the edges start to curl back. Flip the pancake over.  Cook the pancake briefly on this side, then slide it out on to a plate.

Cook the rest of the mixture in the same way. Allow pancakes to cool slightly then sprinkle with confectioner’s sugar.

Second Price Hill Mystery Coming Soon

I'm happy to announce that my second mystery, An Ideal Way to Fly, will be coming out soon—within a few days, if all goes well. It's being published as the last joint venture between Edgecliff Press and the Price Hill Historical Society, and the first book from our new publishing arm at the Society, which we're calling Bold Face Press. (Price Hill was once called Bold Face Hill, after a local Indian chief who lived in the area. This is the second in my series featuring Ed McCorkel, an insurance salesman turned private detective who gets caught up in adventures in Price Hill (on the west side of Cincinnati) in the 1940s that involve German spies, carnation growers, tavern keepers, bookies, and even the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. In the second installment, Ed splits his time between uncovering a robbery plot in Price Hill and a threat to national security on the Outer Banks in North Carolina, with plenty of action and oddball characters in both places. I'll be joining other Price Hill Historical Society authors, plus a number of other local writers, at the annual Illuminating the Arts Writers' Night on Friday, December 6, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Corner BLOC Coffeehouse on the corner of Price and Hawthorne Avenues in East Price Hill. There will be a few art galleries in the area open, too. Come out to see all of us authors and artists from the area, and maybe you know just the person who'd like a Price Hill mystery as a Christmas gift.

A New Book: An Ideal Way to Die

I’ve got a new book coming out, my first novel. It’s a mystery called An Ideal Way to Die, and it’s pretty entertaining, if I do say so myself. People have asked me how I took up writing. Well, I retired early and soon started looking for something to do. I started writing a column for our local Historical Society’s newsletter first.

I have always been kind of a storyteller, so once I got started with writing, I thought I would try writing a murder mystery. I sat down and started writing. The story just started unfolding. I don’t really know what is going to happen next when I’m writing these mysteries, but I find when I am writing I amuse myself. I often laugh out loud at something I have written.

All my mysteries—I have now written four of them, but only one has been published so far—they all take place during World War II, with the central location in each of them being the Ideal Cafe in Price Hill. My father owned the cafe and I remember a lot of weird characters that hung out there. They are all in my books, and it makes for a wacky cast of characters. I never know what they are going to do next.

My protagonist has ventured into other locales, including a fancy country club in North Carolina that is being used as a concentration camp for high ranking Axis prisoners, a little church on the Outer Banks, and a semi-professional theater company in the same area. He chases spies through the midwest, from Champaign, Illinois to Terre Haute, Louisville, Lexington. But he always winds up back in Price Hill.

In between these mysteries I have written an historical novel about how Cincinnati and Price Hill came to be. But that is another story. If you’d like to find out more about my books, I’ve got a website, or so I am told. Take a look and see what you think. If you just want to take my word for it that it’s a great book, you can order it from the Price Hill Historical Society’s online bookstore.

Tennis, Anyone?

Cincinnati becomes a nest of raving tennis aficionados when the nationally recognized tournaments are held here this time of year. There was even a somewhat misguided tennis match played on top of that strange new skyscraper downtown, with tennis balls bouncing down to Fourth Street. So I’ve been thinking about tennis.
Tennis is a complicated game. Did you know that there are two forms of tennis? Yep, court tennis and lawn tennis.
Court tennis, also known as “real” tennis dates back to the Middle Ages, and that great athlete King Henry VIII was a devotee of the game. It is an indoor game played on an asymmetrical rectangular cement court with a sloping roof, a hard ball, a lopsided racket, and windows on the walls that came into play. Only a handful of courts still exist in the United States.
Lawn tennis, which is tennis as we know it today, is barely a hundred years old. A Welshman, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, devised the game as a diversion for his guests to play on his lawn. The members of the Wimbledon Cricket Club adopted Wingfield’s game for use on their own underutilized lawns, which had stood empty since croquet had waned in popularity in the late eighteenth century.
Lawn tennis became the more popular of the two kinds of tennis, but it continued to use the arcane scoring system that came from court tennis, probably because they thought it would confuse the most people.
In court tennis, each score in a game was worth fifteen points: 15-30-45-Game. Lawn tennis kept the same scoring system but changed it to 15-30-40-Game. Why? Apparently, the 45 was changed to 40 to make the scores easier to announce. (Seems to me that everything would have been easier if they just scored it like Ping-Pong.) In court tennis, there were six sets of four games. The match concluded when a player had completed a circle of 360 degrees (24 × 15).
Lawn tennis changed from six sets to three or five. So the scoring system now makes no sense at all. When the game is tied after six points, it is called “deuce.” That comes from the Italian a due, meaning two points needed to win and leads me to wonder how in the “deuce” did I ever get started writing this thing?

Let the Sun Shine on Price Hill

I've been learning about solar energy, solar panels, all that good green stuff. We're looking into putting solar panels on the roof of the Price Hill Historical Society, with the help of Price Hill Will and maybe a little assistance from the state, courtesy of our own Price Hill representative, Denise Driehaus. There's a lot of technical stuff, of course, but we could serve as an example for alternative energy projects, and if what the contractors say is true, the electric company could end up owing us money at the end of the year. Now, that's an idea even a curmudgeon can get behind. So far I've been to a couple of meetings, so we'll have to see how this works out, but it's just another reason why I'll be looking forward to sunny days if we get those solar panels installed.

New Year's Resolutions

What have I been up to, you've probably been thinking, if you read my blog regularly. (Does anyone read my blog regularly?) Well, I haven't been writing it regularly for the past month or so, that's for sure. The holidays are a busy time, I guess (that picture is me waking up from my short winter's nap, so you can see I've been so busy I plumb wore myself out). But now it's the new year, and I've resolved to post things more often on my blog. We'll see how that works out. I've been thinking about New Year's resolutions because we recently put in a display at the Covedale Branch Library about just that topic. Apparently, the tradition of making New Year’s resolutions began with the Babylonians, who resolved to start the New Year with a clean state by returning borrowed farm equipment. There’s a resolution everyone can make and keep—return all borrowed farm equipment by the end of January. As for me, I've resolved to keep up with my Curmudgeon column as well as my blog (I've written a couple of new Curmudgeons in the past couple of days) and I will resolve to finish the model of the Price Hill Incline I've been working on for awhile. It's looking pretty good, and I'm hoping to get it installed upstairs at the Price Hill Historical Society Museum before the year is over. Mark Twain once said that New Year’s Day is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions, then a week later, you can begin paving hell with them as usual. He may be right.