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wrote:
> Is it common to save and re-use the corn husks that cover a tamale?

No, the husks are something inconvenient and messy that I want to get
rid of as quickly as possible, so I can enjoy the taste of the masa and
meat/sauce in the tamale...

The corn husk is just a natural wrapper that serves the function of
keeping the moist masa from dripping away while the tamale is being
steamed...

I was really surprised the first time I bought a home made Mexican
tamale from a lunch wagon and found that it was wrapped in a disgusting
greasy corn husk. The problem was how to unwrap the tamale and get rid
of the husk without getting grease all over my fingers and all over the
table in the employee's lunch room. I had certainly never been served a
corn husk wrapped tamale in any Mexican restaurant!

Do you live somewhere that dried corn husks are hard to get? I could
buy a bag of *hojas* at the local 99 Cents Only store for less than a
buck...

But I don't use corn husks at all, I make my tamales *en casserole* and
they wind up tasting exactly like---tamales...

"Tamale" is a Spanish word that comes from the Nahuatl "tamalli",
meaning steamed cornmeal dough...

(Local Native Americans here in California who didn't grow corn at all
still made tamales. They knew about corn and beans and squash and chili
peppers, but they just didn't need to practice agriculture, they
harvested everything that grew wild, in its own season. Salinan Indian
tamales are recorded in the diary of Don Pedro Fages, who accompanied
the Portola expedition looking for Monterey bay in 1769. Fages wrote of
the delicious tamales made from the holly leaf cherry, which grows wild
all over the Santa Lucia mountains. Other writers described the tamales
as "black". If the Indians here didn't have corn, they had no corn
husks either, but they still steamed their tamales with masa made from
the ground up seeds of the above-mentioned holly leaf cherry or masa
made from ground acorn flour. Perhaps they steamed them in a reed
basket, over rocks heated red hot in a fire and then poured water over
the rocks...)

The ancient mesoamericans in Mexico probably steamed their tamales in
an earth oven filled with hot rocks and they poured water over the
rocks to make steam and then covered the hole with leaves and dirt to
hold in the steam...

So the corn husk wrapper kept the masa from getting wet from steam and
dripping away and the corn husk wrapper kept dirt out of the tamale.
When the earth oven was opened, the tamales could be removed, eaten
immediately, or transported conveniently...

That's all so primitive...

My Mexican neighbors make dozens of tamales at Christmas and sell them
to other neighbors, or take them to work and sell them to their fellow
employees. Their home made tamales can be sold, one unit at a time...

But, if you're not doing something like that, just make your masa and
meat/sauce filling, line a microwave safe casserole dish with masa,
fill it up with meat/sauce, cover it with another layer of masa, being
careful not to make the edges too thick where the masa
top touches the masa bottom...

Then microwave the covered casserole on "high" for 15 minutes, let the
casserole sit for 45 minutes to thoroughly steam the masa, and you've
got *un tamale grande* which you can just scoop out of the casserole in
large sections and you don't have any messy corn husks to mess around
with...

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