Tamales as L.A's first street food

Interesting piece by Gustavo Arellano in the L.A. Times Food section this week on the historical place of tamales — and the XLNT company — in Los Angeles cuisine. Long before there were food trucks for Yuppies, there were sidewalk tamale carts.

Tamales were a natural to become L.A.'s first street-food fad, given their utilitarianism, cheap pricing and irresistible taste. The origins of the city's tamale sellers remain murky, although newspaper accounts place them as far back as the 1870s, and by 1880, a Los Angeles Herald article commented, "The experience of our Eastern visitors will be incomplete unless they sample" a Los Angeles street tamale.

They dominated downtown by the 1890s, specifically from the old plaza near what is today Olvera Street southwest toward 6th Street, between Temple and Main, blocks that attracted itinerant men, new residents and laborers looking to waste their week's earnings in the many saloons. As dusk fell, an army of 2-by-4 pushcarts and wagons wheeled their way through this Tamale Row, setting up shop until last call and beyond.

On the menu was everything from popcorn to pigs' feet, oyster cocktails to sandwiches, but the majority of them hawked tamales prepared elsewhere and kept warm in steam buckets....One enterprising tamalero even rolled around town in a two-story giant, the top level his sleeping quarters....By 1901, more than a hundred tamale wagons roamed Los Angeles, each paying a dollar a month for a city business license.

Historical side note: When the first Brown Derby cafe opened in 1926 across Wilshire Boulevard from the Ambassador Hotel, serving late at night to catch musicians and partiers leaving the Coconut Grove nightclub, the menu was just burgers, hot dogs, melted cheese sandwiches, chili and tamales. The tamales were "made fresh by a Mexican woman in Santa Barbara," the later Brown Derby Cookbook claimed.

Bonus note: Charles Perry, co-founder of the Culinary Historians of Southern California, speaks to the group on Los Angeles restaurants of 1830-1930, Saturday at 10:30 a.m. at the Central Library's Mark Taper Auditorium.

Photo: The Tamale, a cafe that was at 6421 Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles, no date. Los Angeles Public Library