If you go to La Cruz Market and haven’t tried the tamales from Doña Chelo, located on the corner of Gutiérrez Nájera and 15 de Mayo, you haven’t been to La Cruz, because this Mexican snack is a reference point for breakfast.
Consuelo de León Muñoz is a woman like many Queretaro women who have used their culinary skills to create a business to help their family get ahead. Doña Chelo, as she is affectionately called, started her tamale sales business by chance. “More than 40 years ago, I threw a birthday party for my daughter where I gave the guests tamales, some of the ones I had left over. I went out the next day to sell them and they really liked them. They started telling me when I came back and that encouraged me to go out every afternoon with my basket of tamales to offer them,” she says.
Her constant struggle and giving her children a better quality of life made the small business more and more prosperous, “there were difficult days, but I never gave up, together with my children we walked the streets knocking on doors looking for all the merchandise to be sold,” she remembers.
“One day I went to a stationery store to offer tamales and the owner bought them and liked them, he told me if I could make them to sell in a theater where he was the director and I started every weekend taking the tamales and atole.”
That place was the iconic Queretaro theater “Cómicos de la Legua” and the one who bought the tamales from her was its then director Wilfrido “Willy” Murillo whom she remembers with affection and gratitude for the 10 years that Doña Chelo’s tamales were at every performance.
Querétaro Diocese highlights religious meaning of Candlemas Day
Candlemas Day, celebrated every February 2, is not only a gastronomic holiday, but a religious commemoration that remembers the presentation of Jesus in the temple, 40 days after his birth.
Fierce, enterprising and eager to make her venture a profitable business, Chelo sought to have a place in the Mercado de la Cruz where she has been offering her delicious tamales from Monday to Sunday from 6:30 to 11:30 in the morning for more than 30 years. “Now my daughters and my husband go, I stay at home making the stews and starting the production, because we make the green, red, rajas, sweet and Oaxacan tamales every day. Also the strawberry, guava, chocolate, cajeta, rice pudding and other atoles. All fresh and fresh.”
According to the entrepreneur, the most requested tamales are the green ones, making twice as many as other flavors, “I don’t know how many tamales I make, I count them more or less per jar, so during the week one jar is made and on the weekends more.”
Candlemas Day is a date where production grows and the lines are long to buy the tamales, which by the way won first place in the contest for the best tamale in Querétaro within the first “Tamale Maker Festival.” “These tamales are very tasty, they are not dry and they have sauce from one end to the other, not like the others,” says Juan Alcira, who says he is a frequent customer of the stand.
“We don’t take any orders for Candelaria because it would be a big problem afterwards. We’d rather make more tamales and atoles and serve them as they arrive, so we don’t disappoint anyone,” says Mrs. Chelo as she puts the green sauce on one of the tamales. “The secret to a good tamale is that the sauce has a good flavor, is thick and cold, because if it’s hot the dough “cuts” and no longer rises, and it doesn’t taste the same,” she reveals.
For Chelo, her business is a blessing, and she is very grateful for the many satisfactions it has given her. “I always tell girls who are unemployed or have small children and no support to fight, not to let themselves be defeated, their children are their driving force and God never abandons any mother, work is always a blessing and they can get ahead.”
Today, February 2nd, on Candlemas Day, Doña Chelo’s tamales will be serving with all the joy and enthusiasm that characterizes them all those who have to pay for the tamales after having drawn the baby Jesus in the Rosca de Reyes, so now you know, friends and followers of Círculos de Diario de Querétaro, where to go for those delicious little tamales. Enjoy!
Source: oem
