All About The Flavor

Greenville’s Delta Hot Tamale Festival celebrates Mississippi’s greatest native food.

- Boyce Upholt

The whole thing started a century ago or so, though just how it happened remains a mystery. Most likely it was just a few men, farm workers, huddled together for supper after a long day in the fields. One of the men would have been Mexican, and as he unwrapped his cornhusks to reveal still-steaming hot tamales, the other workers would have marveled at the food. Someone must have eaten one; someone must have asked for the recipe. Thus the Mississippi Delta hot tamale was born.

Mississippi takes pride—justifiable pride—in its cooking, but there aren’t many dishes we can claim as truly our own. Our predominant style of barbecue drifted downriver from Memphis; our catfish po’ boys traveled up from New Orleans. Only this strange amalgamation is totally and completely our own. And while we may not know its origin story, we can at least say that it’s inspired one of the state’s great social occasions: on October 21, 2017, the city of Greenville will host its sixth annual Delta Hot Tamale Festival.

As I wandered the booths at last year’s festival—doing my best not to completely stuff myself—I asked the tamale makers what stories they’d heard about the beginnings of this local food. There are many versions: some suppose that veterans of the Mexican-American War carried the recipe home. Others note that similar concoctions were already familiar in the African and Native American food ways that heavily influenced the way Southerners eat.

“Most indigenous cultures have their version of tamales: corn and meat, wrapped up and easy for travel,” Willie Harmon tells me. ”It’s kind of hard to say how that marriage took place, but it did, more than a hundred years ago, and we’re doing our part to keep that tradition going.”