Eugene, left, and Betty Hicks, of Hicks’ Famous Hot Tamales & More

Ervin’s Hot Tamales sits at the split end of a narrow gravel drive outside the town of Sledge, Mississippi (Pop. 461), about 70 miles south of Memphis. It’s a straight shot to Ervin’s from Highway 61, no more than two minutes by car along Six Mile Lake Road. Unless, of course, Six Mile Lake Road happens to be washed out by flood water, in which case you have to backtrack and follow a sinuous stretch of asphalt past oceans of cotton fields, scrubland and irrigation ditches with virtually no identifiable landmark in sight, until you reach a sharp double bend in the road and happen to glimpse the gravel drive on your left just as you go chicaning past it.

There is no sign outside Ervin’s. In fact, Ervin’s isn’t an actual restaurant. It’s just a small, grey house on a spot of land that has been in the family for nearly 100 years. Out back, at the edge of a fallow soybean field, stands a tin-roofed shack where Edna Ervin and her 85-year-old mother, Rosetta, make about 850 hot tamales a week, which they sell in bundles to local grocery stores.

A hot tamale, at least insofar as the Mississippi Delta is concerned, is a cylindrical and prodigiously spiced meat dumpling – typically minced beef but sometimes pork, turkey or even venison – rolled in cornmeal, wrapped in cornhusk or parchment paper, and then steamed or boiled. Its provenance is Mesoamerican; the word “tamale” comes from the Uto-Aztecan tamalli, meaning a cake of meat and corn. Different styles of tamale exist today throughout Central America: a Nicaraguan nacatamale is wrapped in plantain leaves and comes at about the size of a newborn infant.

Tamales made it to Mississippi in the early-20th century, food historians estimate, by way of Mexican migrant workers, who, it’s assumed, shared them with black field hands. They quickly became a Delta staple, particularly among the black population, and over the years, cooks improved on the original design, abridging the Mexican version while ratcheting up the heat index considerably. The end result is hard to describe – imagine a soul-food version of cottage pie in burrito form – but in terms of taste, tamales are unquestionably the Cadillac of transmogrified pre-Columbian cuisine.

It’s tough to overstate the significance of tamales in Delta culinary life, their ubiquity being analogous to that of kippers in a Viking cupboard. Which makes it all the more curious that they are virtually unknown outside the region. Ask sophisticated foodies in New York or Los Angeles – let alone London – about Delta tamales and their eyes will glaze over before they grunt and shrug. If word is trickling out, it’s largely due to Amy Evans, an oral historian for the Southern Foodways Alliance whose documentary project and website, the Hot Tamale Trail, is an unofficial Blue Guide to the cuisine. “They’re such a staple in the Delta,” she says, “but elsewhere people kind of scratch their heads about them.”

. . .

Rosetta Ervin, right, watches as her daughter, Edna, rolls and ties tamales in parchment paper and string

I visited the Ervins on a damp Thursday this April, just as wheat that had been planted in November was starting to come in. Shimmering green fields of it swept out from the highway, ending miles distant in stands of cypress and black oak. Edna, a handsome, soft-spoken woman of 50, led me to the tamale shack out back. Rosetta joined us, taking a chair next to an archaic meat grinder. A wizened, arthritic woman of great presence, Rosetta’s face lit up as she watched her daughter showcase the patented Ervin tamale-rolling technique.

One batch of tamales takes the Ervins between 20-25 hours to prepare. The meat is ground, cooked, seasoned and then rolled by hand. Eschewing traditional cornhusks, the Ervins roll their tamales in parchment paper and then boil them. The parchment is removed before eating, with the final product resembling a fat hot dog with the ends cut off. Edna’s late father, Louis, originally used cornhusks but found they sometimes had bugs in them, so he switched to parchment, even though the latter is controversial among tamale aficionados for its allegedly waxy aftertaste. Edna scoffed at this. If parchment tasted bad, she wondered, why did so many of her clients try to claim Ervin’s tamales as their own? “Some folks try to make people think that these are their hot tamales,” said Edna, with just a hint of disdain. “But this recipe is our family’s, passed down from one generation to the next. And it’s gourmet.”

Edna has been making tamales since she was nine, after her father paid $1,000 for a recipe back in 1966, pitching his family headlong into the tamale racket. “I thought he was crazy,” said Rosetta, chuckling. “But I guess it paid off.” Back then, a dozen Ervin’s tamales, which he peddled from a converted milk truck, cost 75 cents (today they’re $10 a dozen). Now, despite an almost cult fan base, Ervin’s Tamales do not exactly keep Edna and Rosetta in crystal tumblers and mahogany davenports, let alone provide enough income to support them. What’s more, when I spoke to them, the crèche where Edna has worked for years was closing and she wasn’t sure what she’d do next. Salvation, she hoped, rested with tamales. “If Famous Amos could get rich selling cookies…” she said, letting the sentence die.

The city of Sledge lies at the north-eastern margins of the Delta, which is technically not a delta at all but rather a 200-mile alluvial plain between the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers, stretching from suburban Memphis to the foothills above Vicksburg. The poverty rate in the region is more than twice the national average, and infant mortality is nearly 30 per cent above average. Although the Delta holds hundreds of thousands of acres of rich land ideal for crops such as cotton and soybeans, agricultural jobs are increasingly scarce. The best option for many is in Tunica, where a knot of casinos rises out of the fields like a postmodern El Dorado. Edna once dealt blackjack there – if things get worse, she may do so again.

. . .

Diners eat fried tamales at The Bourbon Mall

I’m ashamed to admit I was shocked by Mississippi’s boundless, rugged beauty. I’d half-expected to find only bare-earth yards and sunbaked asphalt, maybe a junked pick-up or two rusting in the wet heat. Similarly, I’d imagined a kind of culinary cul-de-sac of barbecue and fried catfish, not the rich complexity of Delta tamales. Still, I wondered, of all Mexican dishes, why had tamales caught on here? Why not enchiladas or mole instead? As it turns out, early-20th century Mississippians favoured tamales for pretty much the same reason Aztec farmers did a half-a-millennium ago: they’re portable.

“This is the food of work,” said John T. Edge, author of Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion to the South. “A Hispanic labourer could take tamales into the cotton fields, packed tight in a lard can. And because the cornmeal jackets act as little mini-insulators, they stayed warm.” Hispanics and blacks often worked side-by-side picking cotton, Edge said. “I’m guessing that’s the point of transition, and why tamales became an entrepreneurial food for former slaves.”

Hot tamales quickly infiltrated southern black culture. As early as 1936, Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson raved about them (with rather lascivious undertones) in his song “They’re Red Hot”: “I got a letter from a girl in the room / Now she got something good she got to bring home soon, now / It’s hot tamales and they’re red hot, yes she got ’em for sale.”

Tamales underwent a subsequent transformation during the “great migration”, when southern blacks flocked north in search of jobs and a less heinous social climate. On the south side of Chicago, the Delta tamale morphed into the Mother-in-Law sandwich, which is basically a tamale and Chicago-style hot dog hybrid topped with onions and peppers.

But the cuisine, according to Edge, transcends race and culture. Sicilian and Italian immigrants also adopted tamales, as did the occasional good ol’ boy, with everyone forging their own versions of what Edge called a “bastardised Mexican tamale”. Importantly, early Delta tamales were made with pork and corn, the bedrock ingredients of traditional Deep South cooking for blacks and whites alike.

Compared with other food, they were also cheap. In Depression-era America, when the average annual salary was about $1,300, a dozen tamales cost 25-30 cents – it didn’t hurt that they also happened to be delicious.

. . .

Today, there are no fewer than 40 tamale establishments in the Mississippi Delta proper, as well as two in Natchez and one each in Jackson and Lumberton. They range from roadside cafés to sidewalk carts to juke joints to backwoods dives to gas stations to private homes … all chugging away in relative obscurity. Across the Mississippi River, in Arkansas, where Delta tamales are rare but not unheard of, was another tamale joint of the more arcane variety, though this one had a sidewalk cart and a mail-order business. There, in the city of West Helena, in a palatial hilltop compound, you’ll find Joe St Columbia, north-east Arkansas’s most notorious peddler of Delta hot tamales. Though tamales are principally the domain of Mississippi River towns, St Columbia, a garrulous, third-generation Sicilian American with an imposing baritone that would give Barry White pause, has established an unlikely tamale empire in Arkansas.

Tamales simmer in a pot at Pasquale’s Hot Tamales

In 1987, St Columbia, reviving an old family recipe, set up a tamale business and named it after his father, Pasquale. To say that Pasquale’s Hot Tamales is a West Helena institution would be something of an understatement. On weekends, in a community of just 7,000 people, St Columbia and his wife, Joyce, can sell upwards of 3,500 hot tamales, all from a single cart located in a Sears parking lot. When they sell out, which often happens, all hell can break loose. “I’ve seen people almost come to blows,” said Joyce. “One lady, when I told her we were sold out, she jumped out of her car screaming…” Joyce sighed. “People get upset.”

This is understandable. A pot of Pasquale’s tamales was boiling on the stovetop in the St Columbia’s kitchen, sending a mist of Dionysian aromas over to where we were sat. With one other person helping, it takes the St Columbias two days to make a batch of tamales. After the meat is ground and cooked, it’s wrapped in cornhusks and sold in bundles of three. One bundle makes a spartan appetiser. Four-to-five bundles is a hungryman special. I knew enough to remove the cornhusks first. “We had guys from England over here who didn’t know how to eat ’em,” said Joe St Columbia, shaking his head. “They try to chew the husks, if you can believe that.”

Pasquale’s recipe was handed down by St Columbia’s father, who learnt how to make tamales in the 1920s from some Mexican friends. Signor Pasquale, who was known as Sam, ran a taxi business during Prohibition, and when he wasn’t busy ferrying bootleggers around the Arkansas hills he tinkered with the recipe, substituting spices and cuts of beef more suited to a Sicilian palate. Soon after, he opened a tamale business with an African American couple, but then the Depression hit. Fortunately, Pasquale’s tamales seem impervious to economic calamity and the restaurant thrived.

“When times get tough, people stop buying steak and start buying tamales,” said St Columbia, his eyes twinkling happily behind wire rim glasses. “They’re a comfort food. That African American couple [his partners], they sent their kids to college on tamales.”

Even in today’s recession, he said, business was booming. Glancing around their spacious ranch-style home – thick with imported Italian furniture and poolside statuary – it was clear that, in stark counterpoint to the Ervins, tamales had been good to the St Columbias. In fact, this might just be the house that tamales built.

. . .

Betty Hicks, of Hicks’ Famous Hot Tamales & More, calls an order back to the kitchen

Why have Delta tamales failed to penetrate the larger culture, despite a localised obsession that is well-advertised through the Internet? Nobody knows. But Eugene Hicks of Hicks’ World Famous Tamales & More in Clarksdale suggests it might be because they are a colossal pain to make. Even with an $8,000 sausage stuffer, it can take three people up to two days to make a batch that will last through the week. Think about this for a second. Pizza is almost universally loved. We all could make and customise our own pizzas – it is not hard to do. Yet, most of us choose to buy our pizzas ready-made. In other words, we are stone cold lazy. Only a gifted few among us possess the time necessary to spend 14-plus hours of their weekend making hot tamales.

And yet not only does Hicks think our general indolence has consigned tamales to the culinary shadows, but that it could also spell their demise. Despite having spent most of his life in the tamale business, Hicks, 65, thinks the cuisine may eventually pass the way of manual agriculture. “People just don’t want to do the work,” he said. “Nobody wants to put in the time and effort. When my time is up, tamales are going to end.”

Amy Evans couldn’t disagree more. “The tamale culture is such an important part of the Delta, and there are so many people making them, that there’s not much danger of that,” she told me. The Hot Tamale Trail website, she added, does not include the countless people who make tamales at home, not to mention several promising rookies just entering the tamale big leagues. “There are people today coming on to the tamale scene that we haven’t heard from yet,” she said.

. . .

On Evans’s recommendation, I set my sights for the leafy hamlet of Bourbon, 100-miles due south of West Helena, where 37-year-old Mark Azlin, a tamale greenhorn with tantalising prospects, sells hot tamales at his honkytonk-cum-brasserie, The Bourbon Mall.

Buzzing down Highway 1, just a stone’s throw from the Mississippi River, I paralleled the huge earthen mounds of the levees, portions of which were built almost 150 years ago. Turning east, I passed lonely cottonwoods, grain silos swallowed by creeper and an unfathomable number of Baptist churches (the Delta might be the only place in the world where churches outnumber people).

Owner Mark Azlin smokes on the front porch of The Bourbon Mall

After several wrong turns, I found myself sucking down Budweisers with Azlin at The Bourbon Mall, a former general store set deep in the countryside amid vast fields painted various shades of mud. “Our tamales taste different than anybody else’s,” Azlin assured me. “They’re closer to Mexican tamales.” To demonstrate why, he led me into the kitchen and introduced his Mexican cook, Veronica Ortega, who is also the resident tamale savant.

Azlin remembered eating tamales growing up in nearby Leland, where they were sold out of people’s homes. He considered them a pillar of his Delta heritage, so when he opened The Bourbon Mall in 1998, he wanted tamales on the menu alongside the porterhouses and catfish. He found a recipe online and handed it to Ortega. What she came up with closely resembled the tamales I’d eaten over the past two days, if a bit spicier. But by then it had all become a blur.

Being a southern boy, Azlin didn’t exactly require an existential leap of faith to toss Ortega’s tamale into his deep fryer. “In the South, it’s always better if you fry it,” he observed. Azlin’s fried tamale is extraordinarily delicious – light, crispy and served with a side of Ranch dressing – and there is no finer complement to a bottle of Mr Anheuser’s finest.

It seemed, at The Bourbon Mall, that Delta tamales had come full circle. From African Americans and Sicilian immigrants embracing them as a moveable Mexican feast, to a Mexican cook reinterpreting them on behalf of a Delta white boy – it made my head spin. And as I drove off, a white sun dipping behind me, I erased hot tamales from my endangered species list. While they might not make it far beyond the Delta, they’re clearly doing just fine where they are.

John O’Connor is a regular contributor to FT Weekend Magazine