Maria Elena Salinas learned to make tamales before anyone thought to write down the recipe. She learned by pulling up a chair beside her mother, Lorenza Ferrales, in the family kitchen in Las Cruces.
She and her brother would argue over who got to grind the nixtamal. She watched her mother turn simple ingredients into meals that could feed a crowd, absorbing the process the way recipes were often learned, not from measurements on a page, but by watching, helping, tasting and remembering.
Eventually, those tamales became about much more than dinner.
When Salinas' oldest brother, Manuel, was 10, a tumor developed near his temple. At the urging of her sister, Ferrales prayed for nine days to St. Martin de Porres, the patron saint known for caring for the poor and sick. Manuel recovered, and Ferrales attributed his healing to the saint.
In gratitude, she began hosting an annual dinner for people in need, including sending food to those too sick to attend. What started as a family act of faith grew until, at its peak, Ferrales was feeding more than 1,000 families.
And to pay for all that food, the family made tamales.
For more than 45 years, September, October and November became tamale-making months. Later, when her mother became ill, Salinas took over. She sold tamales to help put her own children through college. She kept making them after that because, as she puts it, "The people still wanted them."
Today, she still makes them much as her mother did, right down to grinding the nixtamal herself to preserve the coarse texture she remembers. And she continues another part of her mother's tradition, donating tamales to families in need so they can sell them to raise money during an emergency.
The recipe traveled through generations that way — from mother to daughter, kitchen to kitchen, batch to batch. But until now, it had never been written down.
Salinas and her family's red chile pork tamales occupy several pages of the newest issue of Homecooked, a quarterly, advertising-free magazine that travels to a different part of the country with each issue in search of the food and especially the people that define a place.
For Issue 07, that place is Las Cruces, and Salinas' story is the kind of story publisher Mike McCormick says Homecooked was created to find.
"We're trying to understand place and history and what people are making," McCormick said. "For Homecooked, the trick is we're using food as our lens and, more specifically, not just restaurants or professional cooks, but everyday people."
The result is less a traditional food magazine than a culinary road trip through southern New Mexico, moving through home kitchens and farms, chile fields and restaurants, family histories and recipes that have sometimes existed for generations without ever being formally recorded.
McCormick wants someone hundreds or thousands of miles away to open the magazine and feel as though they have spent some time here.
"We're trying to deliver that almost road-trip experience no matter where people are from," he said.
The issue introduces Las Cruces through its geography: the Rio Grande cutting through the Mesilla Valley, the Organ Mountains rising above the desert and White Sands stretching nearby. From there, the landscape becomes a story about food.
The mineral-rich soil, river and relentless sun have supported agriculture here for centuries. There are the chiles most closely associated with the region, including Big Jim, developed through the work of local farmers and researchers at New Mexico State University. But the story also explores pecans and a wine-growing history that traces to Spanish settlers cultivating grapes in the region in 1629, connecting those crops to the difficulty of growing anything in a place of heat, drought, freezes and an unpredictable river.
The connection between food, people and place is essentially the premise on which McCormick built Homecooked. It wasn't his first attempt at building a magazine around that idea.
McCormick entered publishing through quilting. Ten years ago, despite having no previous experience publishing a magazine, he founded Quiltfolk. Each issue travels to a state or region and uses quilting as a way to explore its people, history and culture.
"I just had the idea for a magazine that I thought would be really cool," McCormick said. "It's something that I wanted to make. It followed my own sort of curiosities."
His company now publishes three magazines. In addition to Quiltfolk and Homecooked, it owns Fiber Art Now, a publication focused more broadly on fiber arts. The common thread between Quiltfolk and Homecooked is place. With Homecooked, McCormick simply changed the lens.
He grew up in what he describes as a family of foodies, where Sunday family dinners were an important part of life. His next project came from asking the question, "What would we want to read?"
For McCormick, the answer involved travel, conversations with people, their stories and their recipes.
"We just try to say, hey, this is what we think is really cool," he said, "and let's go see if we can build it."
They have been building it across the country. The first issue took readers to Pioneer Valley, Massachusetts, followed by Austin, Texas. Las Cruces became the seventh destination. The recently announced eighth issue will explore Florida's Treasure Coast around Vero Beach.
Finding the stories once the destination is selected is considerably harder than choosing a spot on a map.
Three members of the Homecooked team concentrate largely on research, combing through local food groups, newspapers, businesses and social media and making phone calls and sending emails. Some stops are obvious. A visitor researching the Las Cruces area isn't likely to spend long online before encountering some of the region's best-known restaurants or the chile culture of Hatch.
McCormick says those stops aren't the heart of the publication. The real meat is much harder to find.
"The vast majority of the magazine is made up of home cooks," he said.
Finding them requires cold calls and emails and, frequently, finding one person who knows another person who knows someone who has been making a particular dish for decades.
Once the stories begin taking shape, the magazine sends two photographers into the community for 10 days to two weeks. Writers sometimes accompany them, though much of the reporting is done separately. The stories generally have been identified and at least drafted before the photographers arrive, but the staff remains willing to change direction when something unexpected emerges.
All of the photographs in the magazine are taken by Homecooked's own photographers. For the Salinas story, that means the reader doesn't just encounter a recipe.
There is an old photograph of Salinas with her mother. There are images of dried red chile pods and nixtamal and pork laid out for cooking. There is Salinas surrounded by family and friends in the kitchen, hands working across bowls and pans as they assemble tamales.
And there is a two-page photograph of old pieces of paper covered with handwritten recipes — creased, stained and preserved from another generation.
Against that backdrop, Homecooked presents Salinas' red chile pork tamale recipe in precise measurements and step-by-step instructions, from preparing the corn husks and chile pork filling to grinding the nixtamal, mixing the masa and assembling and steaming the tamales. For the first time, the family's recipe is recorded.
"When I am no longer here, my grandkids will read it and maybe make some tamales," Salinas told the magazine.
McCormick estimates the team spends three to six months with a place from research and pre-production through printing. More recently, Homecooked also has begun working with at least one local writer on each issue to add another layer of knowledge and context.
The two photographers who came to Las Cruces apparently didn't need much convincing about the area's appeal. When they returned, McCormick said, both told the staff during its post-trip debriefing that they could imagine retiring here.
Unlike most magazines, Homecooked doesn't depend on advertising or primarily on newsstand sales. The publication is 100% advertising-free and reader-supported, with subscriptions and individual issues sold primarily online. McCormick said more than 99% of the company's business comes through direct relationships with readers and subscribers, with some additional wholesale sales through independent booksellers and similar shops.
Most of those buying the Las Cruces issue don't live here.
"I don't know how many of our readers have ever been there or will ever get a chance to go," he said of Las Cruces. "But we'd like to think that if they sit down for a few hours and they read the magazine, it will feel like they had kind of been there, and they walked away understanding a little bit more about the people and the ingredients and the history."
McCormick said the Las Cruces edition has been Homecooked's strongest-selling single issue so far, attracting readers from across the country and around the world. For those readers, Las Cruces arrives through red and green chile, pecans and wine grapes, through farms and desert and the kitchens of people willing to invite strangers inside and tell them why a particular dish matters.
And in one of those kitchens is Maria Elena Salinas, still making tamales much as Lorenza Ferrales taught her. For most of her life, that was enough to preserve the recipe.
A daughter learned from her mother as her own children watched. The knowledge survived because somebody stood beside somebody else in a kitchen.
Now there is another way.
A recipe that lived for generations in the hands and memory of one Las Cruces family has made its way onto the pages of a magazine, and from there into kitchens far beyond the Mesilla Valley.
For a publication built on the idea that food can tell the story of a place, it would be difficult to find a better example of what Homecooked came to Las Cruces looking for.
