Skip to main content
Main

Mexican Tamales

A traditional Mexican dish of corn masa filled with pork or chicken, wrapped in corn shucks and steamed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Corn and lime work together. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 773 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Mexican Tamales

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the corn

  1. Soak the corn shucks in warm water overnight.

  2. Dissolve lime in a quart of water and pour over the corn, adding enough water to cover it.

  3. Boil the corn in the lime water for 2 hours, then wash and rub off the skins.

  4. Grind the corn to a thick paste, adding salt to taste.

Cook the meat

  1. Boil the meat in just enough water to cover it until thoroughly cooked.

  2. Add the sausage seasoning while the meat is boiling.

  3. Once tender, grind or chop the meat finely and mix it with the corn mass.

Assemble and steam

  1. Spread a layer of corn mass on a corn shuck, add a tablespoon of meat filling, and roll it up.

  2. Turn down the end of the shuck to secure the filling.

  3. Steam the tamales for 15 minutes before serving.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Corn + limetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together773 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Corn + porktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,069 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Lime + porktop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together566 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Shelled white corn
Ground into the masa dough that forms the body of the tamale.
Unslaked lime
Softens the corn skins so they rub off and helps the corn grind into a smoother dough.
Pork or chicken meat
Provides the savory, moist filling wrapped inside the corn mass.
Zanzibar-brand mexican sausage seasoning
Flavors the meat with sausage-style spices as it cooks.

The step that matters

Boil the corn in the lime water for 2 hours. Lime (calcium hydroxide) loosens the hulls and softens the kernels; under-cooking leaves skins stuck and a grainy dough, while the alkaline treatment also improves the corn's flavor and binding in the masa.

Swap the lime

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (corn, pork):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Limethe original
  4. Cherryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, pork. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Corn FrittersCorn Fritters203 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesCream of Corn SoupCream of Corn Soup50 recipes