One afternoon in late March I was tooling around the west side with my pals Rob Lopata and Peter Engler. I’ve written about Engler’s exploration of the underexposed culinary culture of the south and west sides before. This time we were out looking for soul food restaurants that have so far escaped the unrelenting glare of our rapacious local food media. But the day’s eureka moment came when Peter spotted an abandoned hand-lettered red-and-yellow sign near Chicago and Laramie advertising mississippi hot tamales from the delta.
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Engler is a geneticist by trade, but among the food obsessed he’s recognized as a champion of the indigenous sandwich known as the mother-in-law, which in its most familiar form is a Supreme- or Tom Tom-brand tamale nestled in a hot dog bun and smothered with chili. Those local factory-made tamales have some glancing but still intriguing similarities to the Delta tamale—the greasy, spicy southern descendant of the Mexican original, made with cornmeal rather than masa and stuffed with ground beef or pork. Ever since food writer John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, posted a query on Chowhound eight years ago looking for Delta tamales in Chicago, Engler’s had his eye out for them.
Anyone with a passing interest in Chicago soul food (or the mother-in-law) will recognize some of the people SFA oral historian Amy C. Evans talked to during a preparatory four-and-a-half-day visit she made here in March: they include icons like Edna Stewart of Edna’s, James Lemons of Lem’s, Barbara Ann Bracy of Barbara Ann’s BBQ, and Izola White of Izola’s. Most had been featured in the October issue of Saveur, to which Edge contributed a story about the mother-in-law, which he calls “the ultimate absurdist sandwich.”
The tamales at J’s are handmade in batches of three dozen by Yoland Cannon, a native of Leland, Mississippi, who runs a construction company and drives around town advertising them on the side of his truck. He grew up with hot tamales but only learned to make them about a year ago—from a “secret” source in the south. (Based on the way he tells the rest of the story, it sounds like that might be his mother.)
Fri 5/23-Sun 5/25, $85
southernfoodways.com/campchicago.shtml
