‘Tis the Season to Tamale

In memory of the women who move us forward.

Mammaw Burchfield wasn’t a typical grandmother. Even though she’d raised seven children and fixed dinner every day of her life she wasn’t in a coma or in labor, she hardly fit the gray-haired, crocheted sweater mold.

Mammaw was beautiful and she knew it. While there was no need to brag, her sartorial and cosmetic choices subtly peacocked the obvious. She was frosted from head to toe - hair tipped with blonde, shiny satin blouses tucked perfectly into no-nonsense dress slacks, and long, reflective mauve fingernails that highlighted her stack of gold herringbone bracelets – all implicative of the trophy she was.

She was also the most competitive person in the family. If you were invited to her kitchen table to play gin rummy, dice, or Rook, it was wise to lose on purpose or at least profess incredulity in the rare event you came out on top.

She viewed cooking the same way. Any daughter-in-law foolish enough to stroll into Mammaw’s house with a picture-perfect dish would often find her offering moved from the dining room into the refrigerator, relegated to relatives and stray dogs with less refined palates.

Mama had learned her lesson early on, when she’d baked a pecan pie so rich, so delectably crunchy, my youngest uncle let slip an audible word of praise. Somehow, Mammaw heard it from clear across the house and spent the rest of the evening freezing Mama out worse than a Yuletide blizzard.

“I never brought anything else to her house after that except napkins,” Mama once told me. “And sometimes, whiskey for your uncles.”

Mammaw’s cooking was technically perfect, but her insistence on dominance and passive-aggressive irritation about having to cook at all left behind a psychic residue in every meal. Still, we neither complained about nor suggested menu changes. We were simply grateful to be invited to eat, no matter how grudging the service.

The change she made that Christmas was shocking. The Burchfield holiday celebration was a two-day long extravaganza, featuring party foods, music, and presents on Christmas Eve followed by a turkey dinner with all the trimmings on Christmas Day. We hadn’t deviated from the schedule the entire seventeen years I’d been alive. In the same way Santa achieved the impossible by visiting presents upon every good boy and girl in one night, Mammaw repeatedly basted a 25-lb bird, baked desserts, and chopped ten different vegetables for three different side dishes, sacrificing sleep and sanity so her family could commemorate the birth of Jesus without a single store-bought foodstuff.

One evening, after a typical Sunday supper of roast beef and vegetables – all of which I’d slathered in ketchup, true to my plebeian taste – I stood at the sink, washing dishes and praising Mammaw’s cooking.

I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that my grandmother loved me, but I wasn’t sure if she understood me. While I loved feminine frippery as much as she, I was too poor for nice clothing, too fat to dance an endless two-step with a mustachioed sweet-talker, and too busy studying and acting to ever learn to be a card shark. She’d been my age when she’d married Papaw and gave birth to my father a year later. The trajectories of our lives were so far apart, we might as well had been born on different planets.

           Mammaw’s cooking was delicious, even spiced with irritability as it was, but I still went out of my way to make sure she knew it. I mostly did it out of fondness.

I also did it because I wanted her to like me. Mama never kowtowed to anyone, and because of it, she existed in a sort of purgatory of Mammaw’s affections. I’d been deficient in family attention since Daddy’s death; I needed all the support I could get.

            I never cared for cooking. I could scramble eggs and boil water for spaghetti, and that was more than enough education for me. I certainly enjoyed eating, but since restaurant food was affordable and Mammaw was already resigned to living out her days as a chef, I thought it just as good to lean on their expert preparations.

            On the other hand, asking Mammaw about her recipes seemed an easy way to bond. I just hoped she was willing to share and not hellbent on taking them with her when she died, as revenge for us never chipping in for a spa day or treating her to Easter brunch at Club LeConte. She was hard to read, even for a sensitive soul like me.

No wonder she was such a good card player. “You know what, Mammaw?” I began. “I think you need your own restaurant. You’re a great cook.”

She demurred, which was an excellent sign. This was a compliment every member of the family had offered up at some point.

“Why, thank you,” she replied. “Your daddy used to tell me the same thing.”

“What’s your favorite thing to make?”

Mammaw looked surprised, as if she’d never been asked the question before.

“Everything, I suppose. I like cooking for y’all.”

That was partially true. I know she didn’t like cooking without a break because I’d eaten plenty of biscuits and gravy seasoned with her annoyed puffs of exhalation, brought on by having to prepare an entire meal for whoever decided to show up after she’d already worked a full day at Watson’s Department Store. I didn’t know how else to help beyond what I was already doing, though. Cleaning and compliments were the only assistance she’d accept.

“Well, everything you make is delicious. Your potato salad, coleslaw, tamales, cornbread – somebody ought to give you a prize,” I told her. “Martha Stewart ain’t got nothing on you.”

Mammaw smirked. She may not have been as wealthy as Martha Stewart, but she certainly was prettier.

“I’ve been making tamales since I was a youngin’,” Mammaw said. “Everyone around here loves them.”

            She was right about that. Tamales had been a Knoxville staple for decades upon decades, first sold downtown in places like the Market House on the Square. In Knoxville, tamales were wrapped in a special paper rather than a husk. The meat inside the meal was either mild or hot pork sausage, and it was mixed with unique spice blends fiercely guarded by each chef. Fall was tamale season. Churches and community groups would boil huge lots to sell as fundraisers, and Mom-and-Pop eateries like the Freezo and Amherst Grocery would add them to menus for a while.

            Tamales were delicious by themselves, but aficionados would smother theirs in chili thick with beans and ground beef. This exquisite combination was called a “full house,” and it elevated the humble tamale to a hearty winter feast fit for a king. I liked to squirt plain yellow mustard on top of my full house, to add color and write my initials on top of the steaming, spicy mix.

            “You make the best tamales in town, Mammaw. Maybe you can show me how to make them next time.”

            “I’ll teach you if you want. I’ll need to go shopping first.”

            This was the first time I remembered hearing Mammaw take such a thing into consideration, and it both pleased and worried me. “Whenever is good for you,” I babbled. “You don’t have to make a special trip on my account.”

            “Well, as long as you keep coming to see me, you won’t miss them,” she said.

            A lightbulb went off in my adolescent head. Maybe the biggest reason she cooked was that she wanted us around to eat.

            “We’re always going to come see you, Mammaw,” I said tenderly. Above all, she was the genetic cord that bound us all together, despite our differences. I’d return to her house until she left the world, or I did.

            I had a flash. “Hey, what about Christmas?” I asked. “That way, you don’t have to make so much stuff, just tamales and chili.”

            She considered it. “Your uncles sure love their turkey and dressing. But I’ll think about it.”

            Mammaw was rarely so pliable. I congratulated myself on handling the situation far better than Mom could’ve, recognizing it as a win even more special than an all face card spread in gin rummy.

*

            On Christmas, Mammaw’s house was busier than Grand Central Station. Three generations of Burchfields would descend on her small Island Home house – the avenue part of Island Home, not the fancy boulevard with the river view – and festivities would last well into the evening. We took shifts throughout the day, eating, celebrating, and rearranging a dozen cars into a driveway meant only for a few. Often, a few of my uncles and cousins would be on duty, and they’d manage to squeeze their police cruisers in long enough to grab some stuffing and broccoli casserole for the road.

            Mom, Sissy, and I arrived around noon. I made my usual rounds, greeting groups of relatives on the front porch and in the living room before making my way into the kitchen.

            The table was lined with newspaper, pots, and trays. Mammaw was dressed in her favorite cozy sweatshirt, the one featuring a rockabilly swine named Piggy Sue. Her pants were stretchy and loose. It was the closest she ever came to pajamas. She was still wearing her slippers, clearly embracing her casual state.

            I peeked over her shoulder. “Mammaw!” I exclaimed. “You’re making tamales!” I leaned in to kiss her cheek.

            Her hands were full of sausage and meal. She patted the mixture into a round shape, working diligently even as she tilted her head to receive my sugar.

            “I thought we’d do a little something different today,” she said.

            “Can I watch you? Do you need help with anything?”

            “I’m good. Go get you some tea, and I’ll show you what I’m doing.”

            I loaded one of her footed beverage glasses with ice and poured the brew into it. The tea was so fresh it was still warm, the ice popping and cracking like fireworks as it cooled things to a perfect temperature.

            Mammaw moved quickly from pot to pot. She scooped a handful of meal from one, flattened it on her palm, then scooped the sausage and spice mixture from a different pot and loaded it on top of the meal. She grabbed more meal to enclose the sausage, encasing it on all sides like an envelope.

            Once the meat was sealed in meal, she laid it atop a piece of parchment paper. I already knew Mammaw was particular about her tamale paper, refusing to purchase it anywhere except White Stores on Sevier Avenue. She preferred the local business touch of White Stores over the impersonal Kroger supermarket, even though Kroger had better prices and an easier parking lot in which to navigate her behemoth copper Cadillac.

            The moisture from the meal soaked through the parchment onto the newspaper underneath. The newspaper did a good job of protecting the table, but I wondered how much ink we’d ingested over the years, and if Mammaw’s tamales were worth potentially being poisoned over.

            I relived my first bite of a tamale, imagining my teeth slicing through the delicate corn shell and finding the pleasant, muted heat of the sausage inside, and decided they were.

            Mammaw then wrapped the paper around the tamales, tied them with clean string at the top, middle, and bottom, and dropped them onto a tray to await boiling. I watched for a while, appreciating the trouble it took to assemble things. Making them wasn’t hard, but the buttache of tying a million strings and washing a dozen pans afterwards was significant.

            “Thank you for going to all this trouble, Mammaw. I hope this is easier than making a turkey dinner,” I said.

            “It’s not so bad,” she replied.

            “I learned a lot from you today, but I don’t think I’m going to be making these on my own anytime soon. I’m not much of a cook.”

            I heard the briefest delay before she answered, as if her response required more effort than usual. “You need to focus on college anyway,” she said.

            In her pause, I heard the half-century of progress the world had experienced since she was seventeen. College had been out of reach for Mammaw. She’d been a mother by then.

After Papaw died, Mammaw became certified as a surgery tech at St. Mary’s hospital until retirement. She went to work at Watson’s a few years later because she needed the money. Mammaw was bright and capable, but oddly uncurious about the world. I’d never seen her read anything except the Avon catalog and her flour-stained Mary Starr cookbook.

I didn’t know why. She loved to dance and play cards. Maybe school always bored her, and she found no joy in voluntary education.

It was also not so long ago that legally, women had fewer liberties than the male children they diapered. Hell, even the department store credit card Mammaw was required to peddle would’ve been off-limits to her without Papaw’s approval just four years before my birth. A woman’s right to vote was barely two years old when Mammaw was born. Collectively, we were nowhere near the end of the grueling march towards equality.

I wondered if the prayers whispered by my great-grandmother, who died when Mammaw was a girl, held gratitude for her baby’s potential. Mothers had been shipwrecked in one way or another since the beginning of time. They held their daughters above the swell of dangerous, oppressive waters, hoping the currents would float their precious ones to islands of opportunity the mothers would never see as they swam out too far and the waters began to cover their bellies, their necks, their fingertips.

Whatever the reason for her reading material, I hoped it was because Mammaw wanted it to be that way.

“I’ll do good in college. Promise.”

“Well, I know that,” she said simply, picking up the tray of tamales to take to the stove.

She didn’t say anything else, but she didn’t have to. Nearly every academic occasion of which I’d been a part - from the 3rd grade play where I’d been cast as a tomato to my National Honor Society induction - Mammaw had been there, perfumed, pretty, and proud of me. That would never change.

“You want me to start cleaning up?” I asked her.

“Sure, honey.”

            I stacked the pots next to the sink and removed the soggy newspaper from the table. The tamales twisted excitedly in the boiling water, ready to warm every Burchfield belly on this chilly winter day. I gathered the remaining cuts of twine, straightening them in my hand before tucking them back onto the spool.

Not every Christmas was special, but once in a while, we learned a new way to tie the strings that bound our hearts together.