Concession stand open Friday and Saturday offering tamales, tamale plates, muffalettas, chili and chili pies. All homemade.
Owner Joe St. Columbia’s Sicilian-American family has been making hot tamales since the early years of the twentieth century. It all began when Joe’s Sicilian immigrant grandfather settled in the Delta and visited the cotton fields and sawmills along the levee, delivering foods as a merchant. He was a peddler marketing his wares to the immigrant workers that worked along the river. Basic similarities between Italian and Spanish made it possible for Pasquale St. Columbia to communicate with the Mexican workers he met and befriended, and they taught him to make the hearty and delicious portable food they brought to work in the fields day after day. Migrant workers shared their hot tamales in other cotton towns, and eventually the tradition of Delta tamales took hold.
Corn shucks are lined with masa made from freshly ground yellow corn meal, with the hand-rolled tamales simmering in a spicy broth for six hours rather than steaming. The tamales can also be ordered online and shipped.
