PORT ANGELES — When Manuela Velasquez uses a particular spice, she doesn’t sprinkle or mince. She folds it in with both muscular hands.
Just don’t ask her for the recipe, because like many tradition-enriched cooks, she doesn’t do strict measurements.
“I cook with passion, with love,” Velasquez declared before a highly attentive audience inside the Longhouse at Peninsula College at 1502 E. Lauridsen Blvd. in Port Angeles.
Velasquez, who left her native Mexico more than 31 years ago to build a life in Forks, spent the afternoon of April 23 teaching a roomful of people from all over Clallam County to make tamales from scratch.
This year the college, using an Access and Success grant from the U.S. Department of Education, is offering a series of cultural programs designed to awaken locals, students or not, to the cultural richness in their midst.
Facilitator, of course, means one who makes something easier. And make it easier Velasquez did, bringing ready-to-assemble ingredients: masa — dried corn, finely ground — and the corn husks, the cooked meat and the salsa already blended.
“Making tamales is a lot of work,” Velasquez acknowledged.
“When I make tamales, I don’t make 20. I don’t make 40 or 50. I make 100,” each of which contains her homemade salsa.
After a quick demonstration of how to make water, masa and shortening into a malleable dough, Velasquez invited her audience up to her table.
Nobody hesitated, and within seconds the assembly line was running.
An array of people, brown-skinned, fair-skinned, young, not that young, stood side by side, painting the soft corn husks with dough, then filling them with red salsa, meat and cheeses.
The masa is the foundation for it all, Velasquez said.
And while tamales are a celebratory food, often served on special occasions, tortillas made with the ground corn are a staff of life.
“This is the holy bread of Latin America,” Velasquez said.
“Rich people, low income, middle class — you see tortillas in every home.”
And since homemade tortillas are the supreme manifestation, Velasquez will come back to the Longhouse to conduct another workshop: tortilla-making on May 21.
Her two-hour tamale construction course progressed smoothly, with Velasquez chatting with participants about cooking techniques, and everybody sharing fond memories of Mexican meals at various cities across this country.
After a half-hour or so of tamale-steaming, it was time to eat — and talk about the next Longhouse programs celebrating Latin American culture.
This Wednesday — the Cinco de Mayo holiday in Mexico — Beatriz Giraldo, a native of Colombia who lives in Port Angeles, will facilitate a salsa dancing class from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
The session is suitable for beginners as well as experienced dancers, and it is free for all.
On May 13, Native American art will be the topic, as Theresa Parker, education coordinator of the Makah Cultural and Research Center in Neah Bay, teaches workshop participants how to make roses out of cedar bark.
And Velasquez’s tortilla workshop will go from 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. May 21; like the other classes, it’s free.
There’s a kind of parallel here: Much like corn sustains Latin America, the cedar tree is a provider of many necessities for the Salish tribes of the Pacific Northwest.
Deirdre Frank, a coordinator of the cultural programs, said the Access and Success grant is also funding a welcome figure.
The Lower Elwha Klallam tribe donated a specially selected 20-foot log, Frank said, to be carved by Jamestown S’Klallam tribal artist Jeff Monson and assistants and then erected at the entrance to the Longhouse.
Carving will begin soon, but an installation date has yet to be set.
“We have so much going on,” Frank said, adding that she’s lining up facilitators for several more workshops at the Longhouse.
For information about the college’s cultural programs, phone Frank at 360-417-7992 or e-mail dfrank@pencol.edu.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladaily news.com.