Today on Food on Fridays we time-travel back to Silver City last December to visit their annual Tamale Festival — a sagra by any other name.  

What’s a sagra, I hear you ask? Well, it’s an Italian word for a particular kind of little food festival.  Back in Bolzano, there would periodically be these small festivals in different neighborhoods. Each sagra had a particular theme, usually a region of Italy. So during the festival people would sing traditional songs, dance traditional dances, and eat traditional foods from that region or town (e.g. the region of Tuscany, or the city of Mantova, etc.). Click here to see a list of links to old blog posts about the sagras (note that not all the photos in those old posts still work, but the text still does).

Anyway,  the sagras in Italy were always fun: the food was all made by the locals putting on the festival, and people of all ages participated.  Sort of like a small-scale school fair, perhaps, also with more focus on food and music.

So it was interesting to discover that the last day of our visit in Silver City, New Mexico last year coincided with the annual Tamale Festival.  Tamales are cornmeal dumplings filled with a variety of ingredients, perhaps pork, or beef, or cheese; there’s even a sweet kind made with pine nuts and raisins. The dumpling is then wrapped in a corn husk and steamed, and served with and without sauce.

Pine Nut and Raisin tamale, Silver City festival

Both Chris and I really love tamales — on our trip through the Southwest we sought them out as much as possible.  So, when we learned that the annual tamale festival was happening the day we were scheduled to leave town, we arranged with the hotel to allow us to check out in the afternoon so that we could visit the festival. We had a great time, catching a few of the performances and sampling the locals’ cuisine.

School-aged performers, Silver City festival

Those little kids dancing were having a blast twirling around like that.  The band members you can see in the background were really outstanding; they were a high-school mariachi band who had travelled to Silver City from out-of-town for the festival, and one of the guys was really fantastic.

Anyway, we sampled a bunch of tamales, but I don’t seem to have any photos of anything but that sweet one pictured above.  All the ones we tried were offered by various groups (e.g. high school organizations or private music or sports groups), with the tamales having been made by the members of the groups (or the members’ mothers and/or grandmothers).  People were relaxed and catching up with friends, and nobody seemed bothered by the fact that we clearly weren’t from there, even though it seemed like everyone else knew everybody else.

So before leaving New Mexico we spent a few hours soaking in the atmosphere of a Silver City sagra. A fun Food on Friday memory of a fun festival and some delicious tamales.