Tamale Festival offers ingredients for parish fundraising opportunities

By Ambria Hammel, The Catholic Sun
November 16, 2006

While household cooks are gathering Thanksgiving recipes and ingredients, one grocery store advises preparing for another annual feast: the Tamale Festival.

The supermarket promises to help Catholic cooks with the cost of ingredients if they make the tamales as a parish family. It even provides a venue to sell them and allows parishes to keep all of the proceeds.

“Tamales are to Christmas what a turkey is to Thanksgiving,” explained Robert Ortiz, Food City’s vice president of merchandising.

Food City will host the sixth annual Tamale Festival Dec. 9-10. The event features roughly 30 tamale-making groups — mainly churches — selling the Hispanic food staple by the dozens.

Organizers say shoppers from all cultures flock to the festival by the thousands to sample a variety of tamales. Customers return to their favorite booth to stock up.

“Everybody is geared on tamale season,” Ortiz said. He added that each department in the store is prepared to help customers find the ingredients they want.

Origins of tamales

Tribal women were likely the first to make tamales. They needed a way to preserve and wrap meat-filled corn dough used to feed Aztec, Mayan and Incan armies.

Today’s tamale makers also prepare sauces, vegetables, seafood and sweets to stuff inside. The sauce adds flavor and moistness. The other ingredients give the tamales the chef’s personal touch and may help determine the recipe’s origin.

Ortiz learned after years of hosting the festival that parts of southern Mexico and Central America wrap their tamales in banana leaves instead of cornhusks. He said the leaves give the tamales a different texture.

Parishioners at San Martin de Porres have also learned a bit about making tamales. They spent three full days last year making 56 dozen red chili tamales to sell at the festival.

It wasn’t enough.

“We sold out,” parish secretary Dorothy Contreras said. “I hope this year we make a lot more.”

The parish raised $1,000 at the festival, which helped the church pay for a new $72,000 roof installed over the summer. The old one was in disrepair.

“We enjoy it because we always get to make a little extra money,” for the church, Contreras said. This will mark the parish’s fourth year in the tamale festival.

“It creates a bit of excitement for us,” Ortiz said on behalf of Food City.

The event also includes other food items and a statewide tamale cook-off. Live music, Latin American arts and crafts and children’s activities will also be part of the celebration.

The festival is free and open to the public. It will be held at Cesar Chavez Plaza, First Avenue and Washington Street.

To reserve a parish booth, call Camille Diaz of Arvizu Advertising at (602) 279-4669, ext. 112.