The History behind Pasquale's Tamales
Have you been wondering how an Italian family
came to be making Mexican tamales? Well,
it all started like this...
Pasquale St. Columbia came to Helena, Arkansas
from Sicily in the late 1800's. Pasquale
visited the cotton fields and sawmills along
the levee, delivering foods as a merchant
from 1892 to 1912. He was a peddler marketing
this wares to the immigrant farm workers,
many of whom were Mexican, that worked along
the river.
Pasquale never met a stranger and made friends
fast. He was very jolly, and friendly and
talkative. Because they could understand
each other's languages, the cultural exchange
between Pasquale and the Mexican immigrants
he met and befriended was easy.
Pasquale learned to prepare and eat tamales
from the Mexican farm workers. He shared
his recipe for Italian spaghetti and, in
turn, they taught him to make the traditional
Mexican hot tamales.
Pasquale adopted "Sam" as his American
name and prospered as a taxi driver in Helena.
During the Depression, he built a commercial
building. In the early 1940's, he rented
space to Maggie and Eugene Brown for the
Elm Street Tamale Shop and gave them his
tamale recipe.
For twenty years, the couple ran a successful
tamale business, selling tamales in the early
years for one tamale for a nickel and three
tamales for 10 cents. In the 1960's, the
Brown Family died out and the business lay
dormant for the next thirty years.
Over the years, tamales had simmered in the
back of the minds of Joe and Joyce St. Columbia,
Sr., Pasquale's son and daughter-in-law.
When Joe decided to retire from his full-time
beer distributorship business, the couple
decided to resurrect the old Elm Street Tamale
recipe.
Joyce, a good home cook who always harbored
dreams of owning a restaurant, fiddled with
the recipe until she came up with a blend
of seasonings she calls "middle-of-the-road-hot"
and a sirloin beef filling. They used no
fillers or preservatives in their tamales.
The couple had a kitchen facility at the
beer company so they decided to make the
tamales there. And so it was that Pasquale's Tamales was born.
It took Joyce three days to produce the 200
to 300 dozen tamales that they made every
week. The first day, Joyce simmered it, ground
it, and then seasoned it. The second day,
the meat and cornmeal dough were placed in
a machine that turned the two into perfectly
formed tamales. The expensive machine would
also wrap tamales in parchment paper, but
that's not the way Joyce and Joe did it.
The tamales were refrigerated until the next
day when employees Mamie and Alberta wrapped
each tamale in a corn shuck. Using a long
skinny strip from the corn shucks, they tied
the tamales into bundles of three.
Next the tamales were slowly simmered for
six hours before being flash-frozen. Residents
of Helena could get the tamales from the
factory, but the vast majority were shipped
by an overnight service.
After watching their customers slurp up the
cooking liquid and chew on the wrappers,
the couple penned their slogan- "tastes
so good you'll suck the shuck."
Following along in the family tradition of
cooking after his parents retired, Pasquale's
Tamales is now owned by Joe St. Columbia,
Jr.
The tamale recipe remains unchanged, using
only natural foods of the highest quality
and special seasonings. The hot tamales are
blended to perfection with no fillers, preservatives
or additives.
Doing things the old fashioned way, Pasquale's Tamales are made of high quality beef and cornmeal,
well seasoned in balanced proportions and
hand-rolled in selected corn shucks. They
are tied with shuck ribbons, three to a bundle,
and 
packaged by the dozen.
With no preservatives, Pasquale's Tamales are fully cooked and quickly frozen to preserve
their superior taste, then shipped overnight
nationwide in reusable foam containers. Pasquale's
offers a gourmet tamale made with tradition
and heritage from the Delta heartland.
DID YOU KNOW... Pasquale's Tamales received the Presidential
Seal of Approval!!
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