| PASQUALE'S
HOT TAMALES
Joe St. Columbia
 Pasquale’s Hot Tamales-Stand
Sears Parking lot,
weekends only
1005 W Highway 49
West Helena, AR
www.sucktheshuck.com
As you go up and down the [Mississippi] river you’ll find
differences in the tamales… But I wanted to keep and retain
the authenticity, I guess, of the shuck, the husk that they brought
in here, you know, that the Mexicans used to really use in the early
days. I wanted to keep that. – Joe St. Columbia
Joe St. Columbia is the third generation of his Sicilian-American
family to peddle hot tamales in the Arkansas Delta. Joe’s
grandfather, Peter St. Columbia, arrived in Helena, Arkansas, in
the last part of the nineteenth century. He sold groceries and dry
goods to people working in the fields up and down the Mississippi
River. Eventually, Mexican laborers came to work the fields, and
Peter’s Sicilian dialect allowed for easy communication with
his Spanish-speaking customers. A tamale recipe changed hands, and
the St. Columbia family began making and selling the portable bundles
of meat and masa. The current incarnation of the business, Pasquale’s
Hot Tamales, is a clever nod to Joe’s heritage. Today, Joe
and his wife, Joyce, operate a tamale stand in West Helena on the
weekends and at area festivals. Their son, Joe St. Columbia Jr.,
manages their booming mail-order business.
 Listen
to this 2-minute audio
clip of Joe St. Columbia talking about the early days of his
family’s tamale business and selling tamales from a cart.
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What follows is a portion of the original interview
that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript
in PDF form, please click here.
Subject: Joe St. Columbia, owner
Location: Pasquale’s Hot Tamales – Helena, AR
Date: March 31, 2006
Interviewer: Amy Evans
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Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans on Friday, March 31st 2006 for the
Southern Foodways Alliance; and I’m in West Helena, Arkansas,
at the home of Mr. Joe St. Columbia who has Pasquale’s Hot
Tamales—he and his family. Mr. St. Columbia, would you mind
stating your name and also your birth date for the record please,
sir?
Joe St. Columbia: My name is Joe St. Columbia. I was born October
30th 1938.
Okay. And I know we’ve got a big story to tell here so
you—.
So it all began, Amy, with my grandfather [Peter St. Columbia] in
the year 1892, coming to America and leaving my father [Pasquale
“Sam” St. Columbia] who was a newborn child—newborn
baby, maybe a month or two old when he left Italy [Cefalu, Sicily]
in 1892 and came to America, leaving his wife and baby there. He
entered the Port of New Orleans and stayed in New Orleans maybe
a few months cutting sugarcane down there to make some money. And
Daddy said Grandpa earned fifty cents a day cutting sugarcane for
a few months and earned passage on a riverboat coming north up the
Mississippi River. And he came as far as Helena, Arkansas, and decided
to get off the boat. Daddy said Grandpa’s money ran out, and
that’s why he chose Helena.
So he—he stopped here in Helena and being Catholic,
the Catholic Church was here and that was attractive to him. The
people began—they were—a lot of immigrants from Europe
were coming into the [Arkansas] Delta at that time, and my grandfather
was accepted among the people here in the community, and that certainly
helped him stay here.
He was a merchant and got out among the public and
was involved with food, had—in—in Italy he had a farm,
a little farm, a truck garden like. He sold produce, and they had
a little store…He never came to America with the intentions
of staying in America, but only to earn money to go back to [Italy].
Well he was here five years, and he earned enough money to send
for my grandmother [Maria St. Columbia] to come to America and bring
my father, and they came in 1897. Europe, at that time in history,
you could work all day long and just barely make ends meet, and
that’s why they were looking for something better—looking
for a better future for my father, who is the only child in the
family and the only male who would carry the name on.
Well as time went on and my father grew here in America,
he tried to go to school—five years old in 1897 and he could
not speak the English language very well—at all—and
had to learn it first and the kids would laugh at him and make fun
of him when he tried to go to school. So he played a lot of hooky
and hung out among business people in the community. So as a teenager,
growing up in the early years of the 1900s he hung around businessmen
downtown and learned the ways of the business world, the school
of hard knocks as we call it today.
So he was deprived a formal education because of the language barrier,
and he liked not going to school, as most kids like not to do. So
in those early days Daddy could speak a Sicilian dialect to some
of the Mexicans that came in here, and there were Mexicans doing
farm labor; there were Syrians that came here to Helena; French—there
were a lot of Lebanese people—different immigrants from all
over Europe were coming into the [Arkansas] Delta, But my father
was intrigued with the Spanish-speaking Mexican people here, and
he learned from them about tamales. My father liked the taste of
the tamales, and they taught him how to make tamales. As a young
man, he shared Italian recipes with them. Now they used—Daddy
said the type of meat they used he didn’t like; being Italian,
he liked veal and your better cuts of beef. And they like to season
things a little better, so my father sort of invented a better tamale
using a better grade of beef and better seasonings.
So as the years went on my daddy—at home—would
make tamales with his father. And they formulated a way of doing
it. And the young black couple came to my father; it was before—right
before the Depression. My father had built this building downtown,
and they wanted to rent a space in it but didn’t have any
money. So my father formed a business arrangement with these African
American people to open their—they wanted to open a restaurant
and sell soul food. So Daddy told them, he said, “Well if
you sell my tamales in there, we’ll  form
a partnership, and I’ll show you how to make them, what to
do. I’ll buy all the equipment and you make them, and we’ll
share the profits of the business. So they did; they formed a business
relation, and the black family did well—did real well. In
fact, they did so well they educated their children and sent them
to college away from here. They got jobs in Detroit and never came
back. So [the tamale business] survived the Depression; it survived
the War [WWI]. World War II came on and the business continued making
money for both my family and their family.
And after my father died—I was about eighteen
years old—the Elm Street Tamale Shop that the black people
had down there [Maggie and Eugene Brown] on Elm Street, they—they
eventually died and it fell back into my family. So tamale making
in the city of Helena for a while became dormant until my wife and
I, who—my wife is an excellent cook—was trained by her
grandmother, who was Italian, took my mother and father’s
recipe of the tamale making and we here at the house began to upgrade
it and more or less—fine-tuning with it. So when I decided,
after selling my beer business—I was in the wholesale beer
business and retired from it—we brought back the tamale business
in the [Arkansas] Delta. And this time we decided to name it after
my father; his real name in Italian was Pasquale, and it rhymed
with tamale, so we came out with Pasquale’s Tamales. And this
was about 1987 when we formally, I think, established Pasquale’s
Tamales. And it’s been doing well ever since.
We—our tamales, to give you some history on
it—is made from all natural foods. We start out with around
100-pounds of—of beef. We use top sirloin and chuck roasts.
We use all natural foods; we don’t use any powdered anything.
We use real onions, garlic—no powdered anything; we use—I
think we use all McCormick seasonings; we use the better cuts of
beef and make an all-natural product. It’s—our cornhusks
come out of Mexico. We wrap each tamale—hand-roll them in
the corn husks, and then after we make our tamales we cook them
submerged in a special sauce for six to eight hours on slow heat
where the—the tamale absorbs the seasonings and all submerged
in this sauce and this juice and makes them real tender and succulent.
So that’s basically the secret to our tamales and why they’re
so juicy and—but we use a high grade of—of product.
I’d like to go back to your grandfather, if I may…He
was selling produce and—and grocery items along—all
along the river or—?
Right. He—when he first came to America, what he did was—there
were a lot of sawmill companies along the levies down there and
the farmers, he would go out with in the farms and along the levy
and would take sandwiches, salami, different homemade foods—tamales
was part of it—and they would feed the workers and—and
at the—out on the farms and at the sawmill so they didn’t
have to go to lunch. They didn’t have to stop their work—Daddy—Grandpa
and Daddy would pull up there and they had everything for the people.
They would buy from them like I would do with my trailer—my
food trailer today, you know, and he would sell them their food
and the farmers. And the—the owners of those businesses liked
that because their workers would not have to leave and spend an
hour or two eating lunch, you know. So it was beneficial to them
as well.
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So you’re saying that your grandfather and father together
peddled tamales along the [Mississippi] river?
Oh yeah, they both did it together.
In the early days, were they [selling] tamales that someone else
made or that they made?
No, they made them themselves…They—my daddy and grandfather
had learned from—my daddy was really more friendly to the
Mexicans, and my daddy learned from them. So he and his father got
together with my grandmother and they would make them there at—at
their house, you know—at the store and that’s how it
first developed.
Do you have any idea how that happened? Because tamales are so
labor intensive and there are so many steps in making them, it’s
not something you can just describe to someone.
Right.
So I wonder how much time your—your Italian family was
actually in a kitchen with some Mexicans learning how to—.
Yeah, they would come there to the store, and they made friends
with them and then they’d say, “Let’s get together
and make tamales.” So the Mexicans would get with my family
and say, “Okay, here’s the way we did it in Mexico.”
And they didn’t have the facilities like my family had, and
they kind of got there at the store and my people had the machinery
and things—grinders and what have you, but it was all hand-ground,
now. They didn’t have electric grinders. And so then  my
family had the meat and the things necessary; and, of course, what
they used down there was like chicken, goat, bull—whatever
they could get their hands on in Mexico. But my family they had
access to your better cuts of beef, veal—my family liked the
better cuts of beef and that’s why they—they made a
better tamale.
So then early on—I’m just trying to get a handle on
this—how this tamale making tradition was established in your
family is because—so early on your father and grandfather
learned how to make these hot tamales but then it—it behooved
them to make these tamales because they were then selling them back
to the Mexicans in the field?
Well yeah, right.
So they were selling something that they [the Mexicans] wanted?
Well they would go back—well it wasn’t just the Mexicans.
It caught on among the African Americans as well and—and the
Caucasians that were around here liked them; they liked the taste,
and they were getting something—I remember them selling them
[and saying], “Two for a nickel, three for a dime, would give
you more but they just ain’t mine.” That was a little
song they sung as they pushed the cart down the street. And my daddy
helped a man make the cart that he did, you know—had…But
my father helped this man build a little cart, and they would put
the pots on it—a little burner underneath and during the War,
I think, they would push it down Walnut Street and Elm Street at
night, especially on Friday night, Saturday night. And people would
buy it right off the street. And then, of course, come to the tamale
shop and buy—the young African American family had and my
family’s business—they owned the building, see, and
my family’s business was right down from theirs.
My—my family’s—I was born at 412
Elm Street and the tamale shop was at 4—I don’t know
the address right off but it was about four doors down from it.
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So how did you—do you know how that relationship started,
like how the Browns decided that it was a moneymaking venture?
Yeah, well the came to my father, and they wanted to open a café—a
restaurant—to sell soul food, you know—African American
soul food: turnip greens and what have you—plates of lunch,
a little café. And my father said, “Well how are you
going to pay me the rent?” They didn’t have any money;
it was the Depression. And they said, “Well when we make some
money, we’ll pay you.” [Laughs] My daddy said, “Well
I’ll tell you what, I’ll—I’ll put you in—in
the—” because he had just built this building and didn’t
have a tenant, and he needed a tenant. He said, “I’ll
tell you what, I’ll put in the building and I’ll furnish
you the equipment to build—make tamales and when you start
making tamales and all and—” [he] set a rent on the
building and the equipment, so they—they opened their little
café. And they probably didn’t pay him rent for a month
or two, you know, but then they started paying him as they made
money. And so they formed a little partnership there, where all
they had to do was pay my daddy the rents on it and they were there—oh,
God, twenty-five, thirty years in that building, paying rent, you
know, on the equipment and on the building. And my father just gave
them the—the recipe to do it with.
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So when [the Browns] had their business but were in partnership
with your father, was it known that community-wide that that was
your family’s recipe, or was it primarily the Brown’s
operation?
They knew my family had a lot to do with it. They—my family
did not run it; they did not—I remember as a kid—child
going in there with my mother and father and we would sit down and
make tamales with them. We actually had hands-on at times but most—there
were times when my father wanted to make something—a family,
you know, a party we were going to have, and we would go down there
and go back in their kitchen and take over making them for ourselves.
We would bring our stuff to make it with, and we’d use all
the facilities they had there in their restaurant, you know. But
our only main—my family would get the income from their rents
and royalties that they had agreed upon with the family, and they
would take everything else. So they made—they did very well
financially; it was a booming business during the Depression. And
when times were hard they had a good prosperous business staked
by my family. My family put up the front money to—to buy all
the equipment, to get them started, giving them the recipes and
everything; so it was a win-win situation, a win thing for them
and a win thing for us.
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Well after the—the restaurant that the Browns had, when
they closed and there was that kind of hiatus of—of your family’s
tamale making and being involved in tamale making, were there any
other tamales establishments around or people selling them?
There were others, yeah. But they would come and go. There was nothing—now
my brother—my older brother and my younger brother for a number
of years, maybe after the Browns—right after the Browns had—had
closed the Elm Street Tamale Shop they had what they called the
Columbia Brothers Italian Deli, which was on Columbia Street here
in Helena. And they had—they did an Italian deli where they
sold a lot of things and barbecue and—but they did the tamales
as a sideline there. The tamales held its own because we had the
equipment, we had the machinery, and my brothers had the recipe
and—but I think I do a better job than my brothers did back
then, too, because we fine-tuned it a little better.
What years was the—?
That was—that would be, let’s see—in the dormant—I
call it the dormant years, where it, you know, it was really off
the market but sold there in the store. That was [the nineteen]
‘60s—yeah, early, early ‘60s—in the ‘60s
up until mid-‘70s. About fifteen years there my brother had
the store on Columbia Street. It no longer exists today. My oldest
brother died, and my youngest brother left here and went to Fayetteville—moved
to Fayetteville [Arkansas], so I more or less inherited all the
equipment and all the things and—. But today we produce so
many I had to buy—I got away from that hand-cranking type
thing. [Laughs] We have electric machinery that’s extrude—it’s
called an extruder. You—we mix up the meal with our big mixers,
and we put it one part of the machinery, the  extruder;
and we put the meat, which we prepare and mix up—grind and
all; we make that and put it in the other side of the extruder,
and then we extrude the meat in the machinery through the meal,
and it comes out on a conveyor belt and then there’s a big
wheel that cuts it, you know. Each tamale is the same size, so they
all weigh the same. And then at the end of this conveyor belt, the
girls take it off of there and put it in containers and carry it
to a bunch of girls sitting at a table; they’re already there
rolling tamales, and that’s how it’s done on a daily
basis. We’ll make 200—300 dozen at a batch. We call
it a batch, which depends on the size of the amount of meat I buy
or get from my producer, you know.
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So when you and your wife [Joyce St. Columbia] went into the
restaurant business and started making spaghetti and tamales and
all these things, what was it that made you want to do that?
Well it was demand…The town needed this type of thing, and
I thought it was a good idea—as a good businessman—and
ventured for it. So we invested and expanded it and did real well…We
did a lot of PR and that type of thing, and I liked it. It was fun,
but it was a lot of work involved in it—more work than my
wife’s health could handle, so that’s when we began
to go back.
Now today I’ve got my son [Joe St. Columbia, Jr.] handling
the mail ordering and shipping, and it’s plenty for him to
do—doing that. The Internet is open to the world now. Of course,
we just ship in the continental United States overnight from our
little factory here in Helena, right to their door, you know. And
so we quick-freeze it and it’s—the whole country is
our customer.
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So has the recipe changed? Like from when your wife was tweaking
your father’s recipe, is it still pretty much what your wife
came up with in the early days?
Yeah, it’s like they use a different type of seasonings. We’ve
added a few things to it. We won't make them real hot; we make them
where children can eat them, where back in those days we’ve
had people dump a lot of pepper in them. Back in the, you know,
they called them hot tamales, and they were hot. Red Hots they’d
call it, you know and—but we got away from making them. We
make a middle-of-the-road-type, where just about anybody can eat
it. And you can add peppers and stuff to it to make it hotter, but
you can't take them out of there once you put them in.
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So how long do you think you and your wife, Joyce, will keep
the trailer [or tamale stand on Highway 49] going?
Oh, we’ll keep that as long as our health is, you know—
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So being an Italian American, do you consider hot tamales part
of your culinary heritage?
Oh yeah, I sure do. I was born and reared with them. [Laughs] Rolled
a many in my lifetime; yeah, that’s part of my way of life.
As I was taught to make sausage and meatballs and all the other
sauces.
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 Well
and today definitely the [Arkansas and Mississippi] Delta tamale
is a very specific kind of tamale. I think over, you know—since
your grandfather and father were in business it’s really established
itself as a unique type of hot tamale.
And as you go up and down the [Mississippi] river you’ll—you’ll
find differences in the tamales. There’s some that are drier,
some that are done in paper shucks, some are done wrapped with—but
I wanted to keep and retain the authenticity, I guess, of the shuck,
the husk that they brought in here, you know, that the Mexicans
used to really use in the early days; I wanted to keep that. I thought
that was important. The name, necessarily—I mean we could
call it the Mexican tamale but, you know, that’s—or
the Delta tamale, but I chose Pasquale because that was my daddy’s
name.
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So do you have an opinion on how it is that tamales got to be
so popular in this area?
Well I think because it was a thing they could carry out to—it
was hot, fresh coming out, you know in the fields, and it was tasty.
People liked the taste of it; they kind of like—had a hot
meal in the middle of the day along with other vegetables and things
my grandfather brought out, so—and they would just hold it
in their hand and eat it and suck on the shucks, and it was real
juicy…And, of course, the tamale was easy to transport, also.
And at lunchtime it was—and they would get it for dinner at
night, you know. So it was a good snack food, as well as a good
nourishing food because it had a lot of nourishment to it…
But they like tamales because it has a good taste; it has a warm
feeling, warm food to—that is filling, that is well-seasoned
and it’s a comfort food, I guess you can say. It makes you
feel good to sit and eat a tamale and suck on the shucks. [Laughs]
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