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TamalFest: Norma Castro on learning to cook by watching her mother

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Norma Castro

Growing up in El Salvador, Norma Castro learned how to make tamales by watching her mother and pitching in to help with the family business. They were poor, so everyone had to help out.

“I started cooking very young,” she recalls. “By the age of 9, I could make tortillas and tamales.”

“It was the necessity of poverty” that started her cooking, she says. But at some point along the way, necessity turned into mastery. Castro is well-known today for her delicious cooking, not only among her friends and family but at her church, St. Stephen’s, where Hola Cultura’s TamalFest DC will take place.

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