In a city crowded with tamal vendors there’s no one like Yoland Cannon. For nearly six years the 41-year-old native of Leland, Mississippi, has cornered the Chicago market for hot Delta tamales, the soft, wet, sloppy, spicy analogue to the standard Mexican tamal.
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Food writer John T. Edge, who contributed to the Southern Foodways Alliance‘s definitive oral history of the Delta tamale, has theorized that it developed in the early 20th century when Mexican migrant laborers began toiling in the fields alongside African-Americans, and brought along these portable meals that had the unique ability to retain their heat.
When Cannon was a kid in Leland, hot tamales were a Friday- or Saturday-night thing. He and his siblings would wait for his mother to return from her waitressing job, hoping she’d come home with a couple dozen.
When he took up this spot he added a new item designed to trigger a little extra nostalgia in Delta emigres; he set up a small Weber kettle on top of his stand and began grilling scarlet-red Magnolia smoked sausages, a product of Magee, Mississippi. He was inspired by a guy back home named “Peanut Red.”
“The south side is full of Mississippi people,” he says. “The south side ain’t nothing but a big old Mississippi.”
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