When I Think Of Christmas, I Think Of My Puerto Rican Mother's Roasted Pork
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I never thought of the meal my family has on Christmas as a piece of history, until I noticed the difference between my dinner and the recipes considered popular for the holiday—like beef tenderloin or glazed ham or stuffed mushrooms. That's when I found a new appreciation for the story a holiday plate can tell.
Without fail, the main event of our Christmas Eve spread is a slow-roasted pork shoulder, known as pernil, which is cooked on low for hours to accomplish the sort of tenderness that falls off your fork. My family celebrates the holiday on Christmas Eve, La Noche Buena, and always stays up until midnight to exchange our gifts. Of course, that particular aspect of the night only started after my neighbor accidentally asked me if I “still believed in Santa” when I was 10. Yeah, I totally still did, but I digress.
The pork is marinated for a couple of days prior to Christmas with a mix of oregano, salt, olive oil, peppercorns, garlic, and other flavors. The mixture comes from a recipe printed in a crinkly, stained, bind-broken copy of Puerto Rican Cookery, a cookbook my parents have relied on since the ‘80s. It’s the same marinade we use for our Thanksgiving turkey, but I prefer the way it complements the taste and texture of the pork. When I was younger, I’d sit at our kitchen island, perched on a chair on my knees as I watched my mother take the garlicky mixture in her perfectly manicured hands and massage it all over the gigantic cut of pork—at least 15 pounds of it. She’d never forget to rub a layer on the thick piece of skin that covered the meat, because this part always turns into the crunchy chicharrones we all snack on while the rest of the meal comes together.
My parents once told me the reason we eat pork rather than poultry on Christmas is because it’s seen as good luck in Puerto Rico. When a pig walks, its head goes straight forward; when a chicken walks, its head goes back before going forward. The delicious, tender, slow-cooked pork is of course a metaphor for going forward with life and leaving the past behind. It's something we all could be better at, I’m sure. That symbolism may be an old wives' tale, but pork remains the centerpiece of many Latin American Christmas spreads due to its rich history. The styles used to slow cook pork date back to the 17th century in places like Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic.
Rather than cooking the pork on a spit over an open flame, my family just uses our kitchen oven—the top one, since the bottom oven is responsible for keeping the side dishes warm as we wait. And while I love the pork itself, I believe Christmas dinner is all about the perfect bite, a forkful of a little bit of everything all at once. We pair our meat with arroz con gandules (orange rice with pigeon peas), and yuca that my mother boils, then soaks in olive oil, vinegar, sautéed onions, and salted cod. My family knows I’m always the person that purposely picks the cod out of the dish to get the most of it on my plate, since I think it’s the best part.
If we get lucky at the grocery store, there will be perfectly ripe avocados to pair with the meal, although avocado ripeness has a different gauge when you’re buying it from a store rather than picking it off the tree in our grandparent’s backyard on Puerto Rico. A nice glass of red wine is also a must; it's now a beverage my psyche has made synonymous with sitting around the table, long after our plates are cleared, as my sister and I listen to the stories my parents have told us what feels like hundreds of times already.
It’s not Christmas dinner without our pork. Some years, our Christmas dinner was held without my sister and brother in law present, because they weren’t able to find a flight, or they were splitting holidays between families...or there was a pandemic. But there was always pork.
And after I serve my plate just the way I like it—yuca, extra onions and all that cod, one slice of avocado, the small bits of pork that fall off the bone—I sit down at the table with whoever could make it. It could be a guest we've welcomed, a newcomer, or just me with my mom and dad. My father will open up a copy of How The Grinch Stole Christmas with a glass of cabernet sauvignon in his hand, and get to the page when the Grinch realizes Christmas is about more than gifts, that it doesn’t come from a store. And I'll know that this book, and the pernil, are traditions that I'll pass down myself. I have my own copy of How The Grinch Stole Christmas now to prove it. Meanwhile, learning how to flawlessly time a slow-roasted pork may take some practice. Thankfully I’ve got time.
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