Fried chicken, sweet tea, and.....hot tamales?

Untie the cotton string and unwrap the corn shuck. Drip on a bit of Tabasco sauce then take a bite. Follow up with a swig of nice, cold beer and revel in the tradition of the Delta hot tamale.

Although most commonly thought of as a south-of-the-border, or Tex-Mex cuisine, the hot tamale made its way up the Mississippi River onto the plates and into the hearts of Delta dwellers. Now it sits side by side with other Southern classics like fried chicken and sweet tea.

It seems a food oddity in a land where Mexicans and Central Americans are relatively few and far between. Yet, it has become a cultural fixture in just about every Delta town.

“You can hardly throw a stone without hitting a tamale vendor,” said Amy Evans Streeter, oral historian of the Southern Foodways Alliance.

Vendors of the meat-stuffed cylinders of cornmeal are scattered from New Orleans to Arkansas, but the Delta is home to the largest concentration, she said.

“It’s an iconic food,” she said. “It’s a regional foodway that has entrenched itself in the culture of the place.”

The hot tamale has become such a mainstay of Delta culture that the SFA launched a project in 2005 to catalog its various tamale vendors. But what began as a simple collection of interviews morphed into something bigger.

“It kind of grew legs of its own,” Streeter said.

Along with Viking Range Corporation, the SFA funds a Web site called The Mississippi Delta Hot Tamale Trail. It lists all of the tamale vendors Streeter has talked with and provides oral histories as well as an interactive map to help visitors plan their tamale trail excursions.

Streeter frequently gets inquiries from people wanting to write articles on hot tamales. And she has had people from as far away as Seattle travel to the Delta specifically for the Tamale Trail.

Some of the vendors on the trail, though, have customers from even further away.

Eugene Hicks of Hicks’ World Famous Hot Tamales in Clarksdale ships his tamales to Hawaii, Canada, Denmark and the like.

Hicks’ tamales, like many others in the Delta, come from a recipe he learned from an old friend, he said. An elderly black man in his mid-70s named Acy Ware took Hicks under his wing when he was 12 and taught him how to make them.

Back in those days, said Hicks, Ware, one other man and one woman in Clarksdale were making and selling tamales. Hicks would soon be among their number.

He was 14 when he began selling tamales. After a stint in the military, Hicks came back to Clarksdale in his mid-twenties and opened his own supermarket, making and selling hot tamales there.

Then in 2000, he moved into Clarksdale’s old jail and opened his hot tamale restaurant. As inconspicuous as it is, tucked in by the Gospel Lounge, Hicks attracts customers from all over.

Don’t expect to get Hicks’ recipe. He guards it as jealously as the Coca-Cola company guards the original formula for Coke.

He will only say that it’s a labor-intensive process that requires hours of cooking and stirring the beef filling. Then after chilling the meat for at least 12 hours, there are hours more required to roll the tamales.

Hicks used to lay out the cornmeal in the corn husk, spoon the meat on top then wrap the husks by hand, but it just took too long, he said. Now, he uses a special machine that pushes out the meat in a line ready to be rolled in cornmeal then wrapped with a husk. But the tamales still have their signature extra spice, red color and gritty texture.

Even with the machine, though, it’s a three-day process to prepare the weekly 150 dozen. Other places, like the venerable Doe’s Eat place in Greenville, use a machine that can pipe out cornmeal and meat simultaneously. Still others cling to the old-fashioned, hands-only approach.

Barbara Pope at The White Front Cafe, a.k.a. Joe’s Hot Tamale Place in Rosedale, took over her brother Joe’s tamale business around 2005. She and another woman make 200 dozen a week, all by hand.

Pope reckons that’s why her customers keep coming back.

Elizabeth Pearson, from Greenwood, says one of her earliest memories is eating White Front tamales. Whenever she visits her grandparents in Rosedale, they order four dozen tamales and make a meal out of it.

Her grandmother brings out her nice china and silverware then serves the hot tamales with Saltine crackers and buttermilk.

They aren’t the healthiest food choice, Pearson admits.

“If I hadn’t been raised eating them, I probably wouldn’t touch them,” she said.

But they are such a beloved fixture in her family’s recipe book, and they’re just so plain delicious, that she can’t give them up. Each Thanksgiving, her entire family travels to

Doe’s for steak and hot tamales. Her mother has recipes for hot tamale dip for tortilla chips and hot tamale casserole, she said.

She doesn’t really ask where it comes from; she just eats it.

The hot tamale has a much richer history than many would probably guess.

The Food Network aired an episode of their Good Eats program called Tamale Never Dies several years ago. Host Alton Brown explained that the tamale was originally a pre-Columbian food as common and important in the Meso-Americans’ diet as rice was to the Chinese.

The original tamales used ground maize to make a dough-like substance called mesa. Cows and pigs were not around in Central America, so turkey was the meat of choice. But anything, from vegetable to fruit, could be used as filling.

The show featured nutritional anthropologist Deb Duchon, who explained that the word “tamale” came from the Aztec language of Nahuatl and means “wrapped food.” Although nowadays wrapped in cornhusks – or in some parts of the Delta, parchment paper – people in Central America used almost any non-poisonous leaf as a wrapping. The Colombians use banana leaves to wrap some of their tamales, Duchon said.

The tamale of the Delta is completely different from the giant banana leaf tamale of Colombia. It’s even different from the tamales found in Mexico or Texas.

Don Bernhard from Georgetown, Texas, said he grew up eating tamales. But on a recent visit to Clarksdale, he popped into Hicks’ to give the Delta version a try.

“We’re believers now,” said his wife, Becky.

Texas tamales are bigger and often have different fillings, such as venison, he said. Delta tamales are smaller – usually just around four inches long. Rather than being steamed, they are simmered directly in water while standing up. Cornmeal is also a unique characteristic of the Delta tamale. Traditional Latin American tamales use masa harina for the outside layer of the tamale. Then, of course, there is the “hot” of Delta hot tamales. Other regions’ tamales just don’t have the same kick.

Nobody is completely sure how the tamale made its way from Central America to the Mississippi Delta. Some guess that Mexican laborers, working in the fields alongside black and white field hands, shared their hot tamale recipes.

However the tamale came to the area, it stuck. And with tamale vendors all across the Delta and loyal customers all across the world, it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere soon.