Question 1

What does “hot tamale” mean?

Accepted Answer

A spiced, cornmeal-and-meat tamale simmered in broth, sold warm by Black vendors in the Mississippi Delta and long kept as a Black Delta food tradition.

Question 2

Where does “hot tamale” come from?

Accepted Answer

The Delta hot tamale is a Black Mississippi food tradition whose exact beginnings are not documented. The theory local historians favor is that Black Delta workers adapted tamales from Mexican migrant laborers in the cotton fields in the early twentieth century; other accounts point to soldiers returning from the Mexican-American War in the 1840s, to Native foodways, to Sicilian immigrants in Greenville, or to an older Black cornmeal dish called cush. None is proven. What is on the record is the sound: Rev. Moses Mason, recording as Red Hot Ole Mose, cut Molly Man in 1928 according to the Southern Foodways Alliance, and Robert Johnson recorded They're Red Hot on November 27, 1936, in San Antonio (issued on Vocalion in 1937). The Southern Foodways Alliance's early 2000s oral history work led to the Mississippi Hot Tamale Trail, and Black vendors remain the tradition's chief keepers. The tamale itself is Mesoamerican; the Delta version, with its simmered, spiced style, is a distinctly Black Southern one.