Mexican music drifting from the radio, Gloria Garcia stands in
her kitchen, chopping onions and garlic and thinking about her
mom.
Mexican music drifting from the radio, Gloria Garcia stands in her kitchen, chopping onions and garlic and thinking about her mom. Her hands are busy making more than 1,000 “Christmas” tamales, an annual tradition she learned when she was a child from her mother and the hours they spent together in her mom’s small kitchen.
“It fell on my shoulders to make the tamales,” Gloria said. “I had five sisters, and the oldest and I were always in the kitchen with my mom.”
For the past two weeks, she has been making dozens of pork tamales to give as gifts and to sell to friends and other people who hear about them. Word of mouth travels quickly, and requests arrive for 10 to 15 dozen at a time, coming from as far away as Clearlake, near Ukiah.
“It’s a ton of work,” her son Troy Garcia said. “She just goes, goes and goes. I tell her, ‘You need to slow down.'”
But she refuses. Tradition calls.
Gloria, 68, rises early to start the time-consuming process of making tamales the way her mother, Josefa Hidalgo, made them. Gloria dons a white apron and pulls her dark hair back like a professional chef. She will switch to a festive holiday apron when she is entertaining nearly 50 guests on Christmas Eve.
She chops garlic, onion and spices and tosses them into a 12-gallon stainless steel pot filled with water and pork butt and lets it simmer for several hours until the meat is tender. A friend who works at PW Market in San Jose usually brings her an order of pork, and Gloria buys most of her other ingredients at the El Charrito Market in Gilroy.
Meanwhile, Troy, who owns and operates the Gilroy Grill at the Gilroy Golf Course, helps with some of the physical labor. He mixes 15 to 20 pounds of ground corn meal for masa – or dough.
“I put rubber gloves on and I whip it up by hand,” he said. “We don’t use any mixers. Needless to say, I have some pretty sore forearms.”
After the pork is cooked and had time to cool, Gloria shreds it into juicy morsels by hand. Then she boils chilies to chop and mix with the pork to give it even more flavor, but she doesn’t make her tamales too spicy – “for the kids,” she said.
She rinses, cleans and soaks the hojas – or corn husks – for at least an hour until they soften. The rest of the family joins in an assembly line of spreading the masa on the corn husks and wrapping the pork inside.
“My husband and sometimes my daughters help. My two grandkids love to help me,” she said.
Canned black olives are stuffed inside too. Gloria puts olives in her tamales because that’s the way her mother made her recipe. She also stays true to tradition and mixes lard rendered from the pork with the masa and meat.
“That’s where the flavor is,” she said. “I know ‘lard’ is a bad word, but if you use oil, they are not going to come out good.”
Last, the tamales are placed in a pot to steam for roughly an hour. Gloria steams a small sample batch first for her family – or as she calls them, her “critics” – to taste, so that she can adjust the recipe if necessary.
“When it comes to cooking, she is really good at it,” Troy said. “She is pretty much a perfectionist when it comes to making Mexican food.”
Gloria started making tamales by helping her mother, who came from Mexico while growing up in Delano in the Central Valley. When she was 12, her family moved to Gilroy. Her mother stayed home to raise Gloria and her nine siblings, while her father worked as a farm laborer. Gloria remembers her mother staying up late making tamales.
“We would wash the hojas for her,” Gloria said. “It was a fun time. She always had a smile on her face.”
Christmas dinner when Gloria was growing up consisted of tamales, atole, pan loco, rice and beans. The first time Gloria tried to make tamales on her own was during a storm one Christmas. She and her husband couldn’t drive to her parents’ home.
“I was calling my mother every 15 minutes,” she said.
Gloria admits it took a couple of tries to cook the tamales right. Her mother died 17 years ago, and now Gloria makes tamales every Christmas and Easter in the true Mexican tradition.
“I think that making tamales is what puts my mom in the holiday spirit,” said Gloria’s daughter, Gina Calgado of Gilroy. “She’ll be tired by Christmas. It keeps her going.”
Retired from working as a nanny, Gloria’s life revolves around cooking and her family. Someday, she knows her eldest daughter, Ruby, will carry on the tradition.
For now, though, it’s Gloria’s job to make the tamales and to remember the woman who inspired her.
“Sometimes my sister who lives next door will help,” Gloria said. “We’ll take a five-minute break and have a glass of wine and say here’s to another year of nana’s tamales. We do that every year. We always toast for mom.”
