EL SAlvador: birthday culture exchange

My host family is made up of a middle-aged couple, Irma and Miguel, and 3 of their children: Rosy (19), Lucia (17), Gerardo (11), and Justin (Rosy's son, almost 2). This past Monday was Gerardo's 11th birthday. All day, the women of the house (including myself) made tamales. Tamales are a special occasion food here in El Salvador. They use a lot of corn, and they take FOREVER to make. Our tamale process started the day before, cooking & milling the corn for the tamale dough. Then, early Monday morning, Irma put the tamale dough (corn, pureed tomatoes, green peppers, onions, garlic, chicken consomme) on the stove to thicken. At the same time, the girls were boiling the chickens and picking the meat off to make the tamale filling. After allowing the dough to thicken, we cut down the leaves to wrap the tamales in, putting them 1 by 1 on the comal to cook a little so they would be more flexible. Once the dough, filling, and leaves were ready, we started wrapping tamales! Tamale wrapping isn't really that hard. You just put a glob of dough in the center of a leaf, add a pinch of filling, and wrap it all up. The dough is watery, so it tends to seep out the sides of the leaves, but that doesn't really matter. In the end, we had 94 tamales. Woo baby! Although I must admit, my favorite part of the tamale process was eating the dough with some filling poured over it before the tamales were cooked. It ALMOST reminded me of grits, one of my favorite foods in the world.

While making the tamales, I was talking to Irma about the traditional Salvadoran foods. She explained to me that tamales were a special occasion food because of all of the time that they take to make, but also that they are a good option for Salvadorans because almost all the ingredients come from the house. The corn comes from the family's milpa and is ground in the family's molino, the veggies are either grown in the garden or bought at the market, the chickens live basically in the house, and the leaves to wrap the tamales up in grow in the back yard. Irma also explained to me that they don't have the money to buy one of the ridiculously overpriced birthday cakes from the town, which cost upwards of $30. This planted in my brain the idea to make a birthday cake for Gerardo. I love baking and I really love cake. I am also a huge fan of birthdays (especially my own). After learning the traditional birthday customs for El Salvador, I therefore decided to show them the American tradition and make a birthday cake for Gerardo.

On Tuesday, my friend Tricia (who lives nearby and came to visit) and I set out for Gotera, where we bought flour, eggs and vanilla from a bakery, and the rest from the supermarket. We headed back to Sunsulaca, and started making our cake! With lots of spectators, I might add. Despite oddly viscous vanilla, a gas oven that wouldn't temperature-adjust, and chocolate that just would not blend into the frosting, we ended up with a pretty delicious all-American birthday cake for Gerardo! Yippee!

Here are some pics...