Horrid Tamale Pie

Nothing helps economize like olives and raisins!

Tamale Pie 4 cups cornmeal mush* 2 cups leftover meat, ground or finely chopped 1½ cups gravy or meat stock 1 garlic clove, minced 6 olives, chopped 1 tablespoon raisins, chopped 1 tablespoon chili powder 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup (or more) shredded cheese, if desired Make the cornmeal mush the night before. Put it in a well-greased shallow pan, cover or wrap tightly, and refrigerate overnight. When ready to bake, heat oven to 350°. Grease a casserole dish. Line the the bottom and sides of the casserole with about two-thirds of the cornmeal mush, pressing it into place. Mix the meat, gravy or stock, garlic, olives, raisins, and chili powder. Pour this into the casserole. Break the remaining cornmeal mush into small chunks and sprinkle them on top. Sprinkle with cheese if desired. Bake 20-30 minutes. Serve hot, directly from the baking dish. *If you don't know how to make cornmeal mush, here is a recipe. It makes the right amount for this pie. Source: Mexican Cookery for American Homes, Gebhardt Mexican Foods Company via Mid-Century Menu

I've seen many versions of tamale pie. The good ones stretch your expensive ingredients without tasting like a tight budget. The bad ones... well, they do what's needed when the grocery money runs low. This particular recipe uses, um, olives and raisins.

Mexican Cookery for American Homes, Gebhardt Foods

 

I really didn't want to put olives in this. They reminded me of the beef-and-olive Hudson sandwiches, which I have never felt compelled to repeat. Then I thought that perhaps the olives and raisins (raisins!) act as some sort of counterpoint to each other and add up to something unexpectedly lovely. I told myself that olives and raisins could be the next tomatoes and cocoa, which make for really good chili.

I have never felt so uncomfortable around raisins. Even putting them next to the garlic didn't help.

The recipe has us mix today's bad ideas into leftover gravy. We didn't make any gravy with this pot roast, but I had some leftover from a previous meatball-mushroom pie. I felt more than slightly guilty about ruining it.

I didn't realize that when you want a stiff cornmeal mush, you have to let it sit in the refrigerator overnight. After all, I only learned how to make mush for the mock pumpkin pie. But after trying a bit of the pie filling, I decided this wasn't worth any mush-related fretting. I pressed what we had into a sort of nest for the meat and thanked myself for cutting the recipe in half.

After getting the meat into the pie, it looked like an exciting pan of pet food.

It's nice to make recipes strictly as written, but this one desperately needed cheese on top.

To my surprise, the cornmeal mush puffed up in the oven.I almost thought this might be all right until I tried to get some on a plate. As soon as I jabbed a spatula into our finished pie, I could tell that it would be far too gloopy to lift out. I don't mind that a casserole that has to be spooned out, but I didn't see the point in boiling a separate pot of mush (which added another pot to the dirty dishes) just for a pan of cafeteria slop.

All right, so this recipe is not meant to be Mexican even though it has tamale in its name. That doesn't bother me-- I am not chasing the "authenticity." But this recipe fails on its own terms. 

The cornmeal mush that got crusty against the sides of the pan was nice. The cheese on top was pretty good. Everything else was a waste of dishwasher space.

To complete the flavor, this recipe needed a very period-correct accompaniment: 

I don't know how they deodorized this before selling it.

I've gotten into this before so I'll keep it short today, but I think a lot of the kookier mid-century flavors make more sense if you smoke like it's still the 1950s. This includes today's olive-raisin beef.

I thought that perhaps the pie would improve after melding overnight in the refrigerator. It wasn't worse, but it still wasn't worth the dirty dishes. 

Even if you forget the olives and raisins, this just isn't a good way to make a tamale pie. I don't mind creatively pulverizing leftovers, but encasing them in mush only yields a pan of mush. You're better off just cracking an egg into the minced meat and making an olive-free, raisinless hash.

I'm stunned that this recipe came from a seasoning company. I looked up Gebhardt's (the company name-dropped in the ingredient list) and they were based in San Antonio.* You'd think that a company that put "Mexican Foods" in the name and started in a city with a lot of Mexican neighborhoods would do better than this-- even if they stuck to basics like garlic and onion powder. 

 

 

 

 

*The brand still exists, but Gebhardt's as a company is long gone. It's been passed around various food-industry conglomerates since 1960. ↪