Anne BralyI had one food and one quest in mind on a recent trip to Mississippi: Find the trailhead of the Tamale Trail and chow down on a plate of tamales. And, as it so happened, the beginning of this famous trail was at my final destination: Tunica, which most people know as the state’s mecca for casino action.
The Tamale Trail is the name given to an area where Mexican immigrants came in the early 1900s. It runs from Tunica in the northern part of Mississippi to Vicksburg in the south. There are several theories as to why the immigrants ended up in the Mississippi Delta, but one of the most likely is that they came to help pick cotton, according to Southern Foodways, an organization devoted to Southern food and culture. And a funny thing happened along the way; when the Mexicans brought their tamales to the Delta, the folks already living there adopted them, adjusting them to their taste and adding ingredients that were more suitable to what they had on hand: cornmeal instead of masa harina for the tamale wrappers; sometimes turkey instead of beef for the filling.
There are as many stories about how Deltans acquired tamale recipes as there are ways of making them. Still, a Delta-style tamale is quite a specific thing, according to southernfoodways.org.
The name, Tamale Trail, however, is a relatively new addition to the vocabulary of the Delta. Amy Evans, Southern Foodways Alliance oral historian, says it was first coined as a promotional tool to support culinary tourism in Clarksdale, Cleveland, Greenville and Greenwood, four of the larger Mississippi Delta towns.
“We then saw it as a promotional tool for the entire Delta,” she says. “The name ‘Mississippi Delta Hot Tamale Trail’ came up pretty organically. Whittling it down to ‘Tamale Trail’ for the Web address made easy sense; it’s been known simply as the Tamale Trail ever since.”