Hushpuppies, Fried Chicken, and Delta Tamales
Coming from a state where tamales are a diet staple, it never occurred to me that they’ve also been a popular food in the small towns up and down the Mississippi River Delta for more than a hundred years. After hearing Joe St. Columbia explain how his Sicilian immigrant grandfather settled in the Delta and worked alongside Mexican migrant workers in the cotton fields, it made perfect sense, however. Basic similarities between Italian and Spanish made it possible for Pasquale St. Columbia to communicate with his Mexican co-workers, and they taught him to make the hearty and delicious portable food they brought to work in the fields day after day. Migrant workers shared their food in other cotton towns, and eventually the tradition of Delta tamales took hold.
Today, Joe St. Columbia operates a thriving mail-order tamale business in the little Delta town of Helena, Arkansas, shipping thousands of the spicy, all-beef tamales made from Pasquale’s heirloom recipe all over the country. St. Columbia lines corn shucks with masa he makes from freshly ground yellow corn meal, uses only the finest quality beef and spices in the filling, and simmers the hand-rolled tamales in a spicy broth for six hours rather than steaming them. The result is a very credible tamale, the perfect example of the rich regional diversity of Southern cuisine with all its ethnic influences or Creolization factors.
The Creolization of Southern Cuisine was the topic for the second annual Southern Foodways Symposium, a joint venture presented by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the newly formed Southern Foodways Alliance. The event attracted a fascinating group of food writers, culinary historians, museum curators, college professors, chefs, cooking teachers, and passionate foodies. We spent Halloween weekend on the campus of the University of Mississippi in Oxford talking, listening, arguing, eating, drinking, and celebrating the rich, diverse culinary culture of the American South: pork barbecue and sweet iced tea; Pasquale’s tamales and Jack Daniels; perfectly fried Delta catfish, hushpuppies, and Fall Creek Vineyard’s Chenin Blanc; a sophisticated Cajun feast and rich chicory coffee; a South Carolina lowcountry pilau; and a cold fried chicken picnic complete with a gospel choir.
In between meals, speakers such as restaurateur Leah Chase, owner of the legendary Dooky Chase in New Orleans, explained what it means to cook Creole in the Crescent City, and professor Jessica Harris traced the origins of several traditional Southern dishes to their roots in different areas of Africa, based on her book, The Africa Cookbook: Taste of a Continent. South Carolina food historian John Martin Taylor described his native Charleston as this country’s original Creole city, and Savannah, Georgia, author Damon Lee Fowler gleefully stirred up controvesy with a paper on the “Upright Anglo-Saxon Spine,” or the English base of Southern cooking. On our last night in Oxford, we were treated to a performance of the food-themed folk opera, Nyam, presented by its author, NPR radio personality Vertamae Grosvenor. It was an exhilarating event.
To join the Southern Foodways Alliance or be placed on the mailing list for next year’s symposium, contact symposium director John T. Edge at 662/232-5993 or johnt@dixie-net.com.
This article appears in November 12 • 1999.