In Mexico, tamales are consumed on different festive occasions, and one of them is on February 2, Candlemas Day. Tradition dictates that whoever found the Baby Jesus in the King’s Bread on January 6 has to treat everyone present to tamales on Candlemas Day.
Since pre-Hispanic times, tamales have been considered offerings, gifts, tributes, and celebration food. They appear distributed throughout Mesoamerica and places as remote as Peru almost at the same time, so it is not clear where they originated or in what sense their migration as an object of barter was. Although evidence shows that corn evolved from a plant called teosinte domesticated in the Balsas River basin in Mexico in a process that began around 10,000 years ago, which indicates that it began to be consumed there in different preparations.
In Mexico, there is archaeological evidence of the consumption of a corn preparation very similar to the tamale since 5000 BC. It should be noted that, curiously, the preparation of the tamale precedes that of the tortilla since in its origins they were made with freshly harvested corn and the nixtamalization process, necessary to make tortillas, was not invented until approximately 1000 BC.
