I have a friend whose family tradition for New Year's Day is to go to church and then come home and make tamales -- lots and lots of them. Here are some notes on her tamale preparation, from 2001.
We made two different fillings:
roasted chiles and
cinnamon bananas. For the chiles, we removed the
skin and seeds and set them aside in a bowl. The bananas we cut into smallish pieces and mixed them with powdered
cinnamon and
brown sugar.
For wrappings we used dried corn
husks which we purchased at a local store. To make it a little easier for us to wrap them, we soaked the husks in water while we mixed up the
masa.
For these tamales we mixed one pound of shortening (I guess it's traditional to use
manteca, or lard, but we had the Crisco handy) for five pounds of wet masa. As we happened to have bought a five pound bag of wet masa, the measuring was easy. We dumped the masa and the fat into a huge mixing bowl and started squishing it all together. This took a while.
Once the masa was mixed, we began assembling the tamales. Onto a husk we would spread about 1.5 cm of masa, then we'd put some filling into the middle and fold the husk over, sealing the filling in and wrapping the masa in husk. We stacked the filled husks in a huge kettle with a vegetable steamer at the bottom and an inch or so of water in it.
When the kettle was about three quarters full, we started the heat. After letting the tamales steam for about half an hour, we took those out and kept on assembling and steaming more.
Five pounds of masa makes an awful lot of tamales.