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MAKES I DOZEN TAMALES

2 whole chicken breasts

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

½ cup minced onions

2 cloves garlic, minced

¼ cup fresh parsley

½ cup fresh cilantro

¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 teaspoon salt

Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

1 ¾ cups masa

1 cup warm water

¼ cup lard

24 fresh cornhusks

Wash chicken breasts, and cut from bone. Slice chicken into pencil-thin strips.

In large sautê pan, sautê chicken in oil for 15 minutes, or until done, and then remove from oil.

Sautê onions and garlic in oil until translucent. Return chicken to sautê pan, and add parsley, cilantro, cayenne pepper, and ½ teaspoon salt, and season with black pepper. Set aside to cool.

In heavy pot, mix together masa, water, remaining salt, and lard, and stir and cook over medium heat until very creamy and smooth, about 20 to 25 minutes. Cool to room temperature.

Trim the thick bottom part from cornhusks and wash well, removing any silk. For each tamale, take 2 cornhusks, pointed part at top, and paste together at one side with some of the masa mixture. This makes the husk wider. Now spread 1 tablespoon of the masa mixture on the inside about 1 inch from the bottom and extending about 2 inches up the husk. Top with 2 teaspoons of the filling. Fold husk around filling, paste with a little more masa, and then fold bottom toward top, making envelopes. Tie together with kitchen twine.

Stand up in a steamer, and steam for 1 hour. Tamales may be frozen and reheated over steam.

THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION’S Study and Conference Center was a large mansion snuggled into the hills above Bellagio, Italy. Fifteen artists at a time from around the world were invited to the enclave. Selected artists with companions had to make their way to Milan airport, and then magically they were swept up by tender arms and placed in a lap of luxury that few popular movie stars or rich corporate chiefs even dreamed existed. A chauffeured car picked up the invitees and drove them carefully fifty miles north to Bellagio. There they were deposited at the Center, which stood atop a high hill. Its buildings were low-slung and meandered over carefully tended acres only a few miles from the Swiss border. Within those elegant walls, forty-eight employees cared for thirty guests and the retreat center’s director and wife. Each artist had a commodious suite.

Once ensconced in this graciousness, the artists were informed of the regimen. Breakfast was ordered nightly and served each morning by footmen. Lunch was served informally at midday. Artists could sit at will in a casual dining room and choose food from an elaborate buffet. The time could have been passed off as an ordinary lunch save that each table sported a handwritten menu of foods offered and the company was served at the buffet table by the uniformed head waiter and the tailored butler.

The artists were addressed as dottore, which meant that their scholarship was respected. They were told that dinner was formal, and that was an understatement. Dinner was an event of meticulous structure. Guests were expected to dress each night and were directed where to sit by a placement, which lay on a hall table at the door of the drawing room. There must have been an exemplary social statistician in the Center’s employ because in the four weeks when I was a resident, no one ever sat twice between the same two people.

Jessica Mitford and I were invited and found ourselves to be the only female artists. We had brought along our husbands, Robert Treuhaft and Paul du Feu, but the staff, so unused to female scholars, could not bring themselves to address us as they addressed the thirteen male scholars. So they called us signora and our husbands dottore.

One evening during a lull in the ten or twelve conversations plying the table, the director reminded the guests that Thanksgiving was approaching. He then asked if anyone had a good recipe for roast turkey and corn bread dressing. I waited, but no one moved. I said, “I do. I have a recipe.” I spoke it before I thought.

Everyone beamed