Tamales

Except for my host mother, the most interesting people at my closest school are Genie and Betty. Genie (pronounced Jenny) is the 2nd and 4th grade teacher. She is strict but kind. Betty is the 1st and 5th grade teacher. She is lively and gruff. So, when Genie and Betty invited my host mom and I to come make tamales with them at the janitor's house I could hardly refuse. Betty, who lives 5 hours away, rents a room nearby and goes home every weekend, pulled into the front yard honking repeatedly. When she recognized that we had not ben goaded into moving fast enough she stuck her head out the window and yelled hoarsely 'Vamos, vamos!' We ran to the car through the drizzle (they call it 'pelo de gato' here, literally 'cat's hair') and before we closed the door were bucking down the muddy gravel road towards the street.
"When we arrived they hadn't even killed the pig yet." was the way my host mother described the event to everyone when they asked. It was still squealing and snuffling even while we peeled, chopped, and set to boil the potatoes, carrots, and chiles. By the time the potatoes were fully cooked the chicharrones (pig skin, with fat and, all too frequently, hair) had been fried. I was very surprised by all of this, not least by the fact that I was witness to the pig's demise, and that it was surprisingly simple. I was cleaning off banana leaves in the cooking shed right next to the sty, steeling myself for horrible shrieks and gurgles, but they simply brained the animal with the flat of an axe head, then killed it while unconscious. No sound other than a hollow thunk. The rest seemed little different from what normally happens to chickens at my house on a larger scale. The most terrifying part was that about four of my 1st grade students lived where the pig was killed and were running and jumping about with knives, clearly very excited to be part of cooking for their teachers.
Tamales, like coffee, are one of those things that make me very proud of human ingenuity. The entire process seems very convoluted, involving a lot of aimless chopping, slow stirring, banana leaf cleaning, and very little that looked like the final product. Once the pig fat had been brought over in several pots, we started making the masa (corn dough). When the masa had cooked down to a nice consistency I thought we were ready to start pouring it into the banana leaves, but my host mother just laughed and produced cheese-cloth (really a big of mosquito net folded over itself) to we wring the corn filled-liquid out of the fairly solid mass, making nice dry balls of cornmeal. Of course, we saved the liquid and just threw the cornmeal away, which baffled me. We then cooked the liquid for another hour, by that time the only light in the shed was glowing from the flames massaging the blackened sides of the giant pot where the liquid masa was bubbling and popping.
My host mother crouched low over the seething masa with her back to me, stirring with a giant wooden ladle while singing under her breath, her face turned slowly to gaze at something across the yard and she looked for all the world like a witch straight out of the Dark Ages. In some ways she was working magic. She had molded powder, pig, and water into a liquid that would dry into a moist cake when boiled. In that moment I began to mourn the de-mystification of the kitchen. Now no longer a place of secret spells and potions passed in a codex through the generations of families, but a room of stale whiteness, where the same motions are performed without mystery, frequently without joy. Ever since that night, on the few chances I have had to cook I have been careful to cultivate a sense of wonder and amazement, and to feel quite lucky that through my (real and host) family I have been intimately connected to a body of knowledge that has become vastly under appreciated by modernity.