ISSUE 41, THANKSGIVING, Part 4: Chestnut & Corn Meal Tamal
A Native Southeastern Harvest Feast Classic
Chestnut & Corn Meal Tamal
In autumn 2015, Slow Food USA indicated that it wished to emphasize the Native American food legacies in the celebration of Thanksgiving. Numbers of people did this, but chef Paul Fehribach of Big Jones in Chicago took the challenge to heart in the most creative and consequential way. Hearkening back to a recipe recorded in the contact period by European explorers in the Cherokee and Creek lands, he took chestnuts, boiled them, mashed them to a paste, and mixed them with corn meal and salt, wrapping the mixture in a corn husk and boiling it. This southeastern tamal provides a rare glimpse of a food tradition as primordial as bean bread, and employing the greatest lost staple of the South—the small, sweet American chestnut, destroyed by the blight in the early 20th century.
Fehribach used the ancient recipe, employing Dunstan chestnuts (a hybrid closest in taste to the American of any variety) and heirloom dent corn as a base for exploring the promise of that ancient preparation. He served it at Big Jones throughout the holidays, using other Native ingredients (duck fat, huckleberries) to convey the flavor potentials of the dish. At my request, he forwarded a picture of this preparation to show how this tamal has evolved into something that could shine in a restaurant setting. In the coming decade the American Chestnut Federation will begin restoring the chestnut forests of eastern America. The restoration of the edible landscape of the Qualla and Creek homelands will no doubt renovate the long suspended chestnut foodways. Meanwhile, this dish reminds us of the profundity of what was lost.
While the colonial era traveler notices of this form of Tamal don’t indicate the sort of corn ground for the meal, it was in all likelihood a gourdseed or horsetooth variety which ground into the smooth consistency that makes masa like meal. Tuscarora White corn is another possibility. Duck fat or bear fat may have been added to the mixture.
I kindly reproduce a photograph chef Fehribach posted when making this dish.