Christmas Ham and Christmas Goose

It's important we separate our selves from rote cooking and rote food. Not doing the same thing over, without thinking, without examining a little bit. What we cook, and examining the ingredients. It is important not to let the establishments presentation of what foods are available to us, force us into eating what we don't exactly want to be eating. There is seasonal food. And also there are times that are different from day to day food. Especially during the holidays, where we focus greatly on these grand feasts. The harvest is on parade. These special meals, Thanksgiving, and especially Christmas, which is celebrated in such a worldwide fashion.

The list of great holiday dishes is a long one as it tends to be our best of the best and more. Dishes like these can become monoliths of culture. We gather around some roast beast, with accompaniments. The proper English ritual of Roast Rib Loin, with rich root vegetables swimming in butter, and decadent Yorkshire pudding. Lasagnas and the rustic pasta dishes of an Italian spread. Latin tamale making is a huge tradition for having everyone sit at the table. A Vermont style maple sugar smoked ham did really exist in small town smokehouses, waiting to be covered in fruit for the holiday festivities. An old fashioned Christmas goose with cherries and herbs and trimmings. Luxurious celebration food.

As time for me has gone, the Christmas dinner has become a much better showcase for memorable, holiday cooking. For all its graces, Thanksgiving can become a little mired in traditions that even the most eclectic dinner table might have trouble overcoming. Certain tired dishes, delicious, no doubt. but its a “someone always makes the sweet potatoes” affair.

In my family, Christmas was the time we got a chance to mix it up a little bit.

These are the dishes we love to make.

My wife makes a brilliant Lasagna that we love to have Christmas eve. With sausage and olives and hard boiled egg. She cooks it with unboiled pasta sheets and not too much marinara, so when it's done its almost caky and the ricotta is steamy and fluffed up. My mother made lasagna. Its a sweet tradition that my wife makes it much in the same way.

We do a prime rib usually a week or two before Christmas with my brothers family. Or not. For some reason this year we made indian food. Rich chicken legs. Yellow split pea dahl with black cumin seed. It was a real good dinner. I suspect next year we will go back to prime rib in that particular slot.

My two favorite things to have on Christmas Day are definitely the Christmas Goose, and the Christmas Ham.

Maybe it is the Dickens effect with the goose? The Cratchit household makes it seem like the greatest meal they had the whole year round. Which isn't too far from the truth. Properly cooked a goose is a succulent and satisfying brand of fowl. It's a perfect size to stuff. Unlike a large turkey, which takes so much dressing it can dry out an already parched bird. The goose holds usually an ample five cups of stuffing, which truly drinks up the lush juices of the savory centerpiece. Our's is done in a little roasting pan that's the perfect size for a young goose. Some square aluminum thing of my mothers which gets passed around depending on whose cooking what. After five hours it comes out of the oven, crisp, fragrant and falling apart. The bouquet of sweet herbs and aromatics fills the entire house. First it was rubbed and brined, inside and out with kosher salt, black pepper, white wine, a splash of vinegar, herbs de province, minced garlic, and freshly ground spices such as fennel, coriander seed and cardamom and then, sits in this marinade/brine for a good couple of days. Then it is stuffed and set out to air dry for a while. And finally it is placed on a bed of julienne onions and garlic cloves, and roasted, for the aforementioned amount of time.

Many of the complaints I have heard about goose can all be solved by one important step. Cook this honker like theres no tomorrow. A tough goose is softened by long slow cooking time. A fatty goose gets its fat rendered out of it by the same. Generally 2 and 1/2 hours covered at 350 and 2 and 1/2 hours uncovered at 300 will do the trick. I must admit I baby mine, starting it off hot and then bringing down the temperature slowly so the last hour is on convection at 250 or so, and the last of the fat can properly render from it and the skin can gently brown and crisp. The two inch puddle of fat in the roasting pan has caught all the flavor of the spices and garlic and cooks the legs and thighs "confit", as does the rest of the bird get larded and macerated by this essential pot porre. The meat will be moist and perfumed and should fall off the bone, delicious, rustic and satisfying.

Goose is still available in many supermarkets. A good indication that more than a few still enjoy this grand, and decadent meal.

The ham is a bit of a different story.

One year we were planning and talking about goose and duck, and someone said “why can’t we have ham!?” and we said back, in unison “because we hate ham!” And as I said it, I thought of all the buttercup smelling prosciuttos and the almost glassy Austrian speck hams, and the fully transcendent Spanish Serrano hams, all the hams that makes ones palette gush. And then thought of the spiral cut supermarket ham that was implied. It was at that moment I said "I’ll make ham, I mean I'll really make ham."

Now on Christmas we have good old fashioned, home cured, sugar smoked, vermont style ham. And its a treat like nothing else. Salty, smokey, and tangy with spices. Sometimes it snows while its outside smoking, and the smell of it all, the snow, the wood smoke, and the meat, perfectly redolent as if I could smell a smokehouse off in the distance of a Currier and Ives painting. And sometime afterward it sits on the table, glistening with a maple sugar glaze, still hot from the coals. The crust is broken, and its sliced. Every one has a slice. This is ham. Never has a meat been so charming as this. Smoky, caramelized. So impossibly full of flavor. A real gift.

Smoking ones own ham is something that even amid a fully flourishing american, backyard-bbq practice, is rarely attempted anymore, probably because curing is, and always will be, part and parcel with ham smoking. I don’t think the status quo is very comfortable with curing at home anymore. A symptom of the new modern sterility over common sense tradition. Americans don’t like the idea of letting meat sit around. Plain and simple. And sit around it does with ham. The last ham smoked out of thiss batch was in the curing brine for a solid ten days. Try and tell Betty Crocker how that could be safe. But not even amazingly it is quite, being that nothing kills bacteria naturally better than salt, sugar and smoke. A perfect system for dealing with meat, and in the meantime, fine ham making, sadly, at least in this country, can barely be noticed.

The food conglomerates version of the “Christmas Ham” has gotten quite a hold though. Every year the tower of super pink hams pile up higher in the supermarket, identical looking nitrate pumped lumps, cry-o-vacced, swimming in malto-dexterin and God only knows. And everyone slices this rubbery, gelatinous stuff onto their plates like a pile of warmed up cold cuts covered in corn-syrup and imitation maple flavor. It’s enough to make ones stomach turn. And it should. Real ham making is in the “religious experience” category. And a life's work for the experts as well. There are guilds for sausage and meat curing that go back, far into continental histories. Yet, even a novice can produce a fairly fine specimen of charcuterie by following the correct steps over time.

Harder by far than curing and smoking the piece of meat is acquiring it. Raw pork legs do not abound in the supermarket, nor do most gourmet butcher sections have them. I come up with mine ordering it from a local meat supplier. But please don’t hesitate to ask your local butcher to get one. If they were in the counter maybe more people would start to make ham. It can be so hard to get a raw pork leg sometimes it seems like no one makes ham from scratch anymore. The difference is huge. So much so that it really isn't the same thing. But if you like ham, and try your hand at a little smoking, after you have the leg, its really not all that hard.

A good ham brine is made from 2 cups kosher salt, 2 cups sugar, 2 cups brown sugar, 1 cup maple syrup, 3 TBS pickling spice, 3 cloves garlic, all with 2 gallons filtered water. Most of the time in curing some kind of nitrates, or nitrites are added. Pink salt. Praugue #l, it has different names. I have not found them necessary in the slightest, in ham anyway. Sometimes I go a bit heavier on the sugar and a little less on the salt. It can give the ham that glassy quality. The brine is heated till boiling then cooled to 38 degrees. The raw ham gets submerged and should sit at 38 degrees (a cold winter garage works well) for 5 to ten days. Five being shorter and ten being longer, it you get what I mean.

And then it is smoked for 7 - 8 hours.

I just make a little pile of coals on one side of the grill and add smoking chips. The meat should temp out at 158 when its called done.

I make a special batch of chips for this. Hickory. A couple vanilla cream sodas, sugar. I boil the chips until the syrup is thick.

I can't tell you how to smoke any better than any other book on the subject. Like anything it takes attention and trial and error. One thing I can mention is not to use chips that have any bark mixed in. The bark puts off a rotten acidic flavor. I like doing this sugar smoke I've perfected over the years. The sugar burns and it smells like the ham gets wafted for seven hours with freshly caramelized creme brulee. All the curing sugars and smoke sugars almost crystalize on the ham. Its a sight to behold. And taste and smell.

When its all arranged, and the goose is carved, and the ham is decorated with fruits. We serve the whole dinner with a rich cherry sauce made from goose drippings and giblets, dried and preserved cherries, apple cider, red wine and sherry, its reduced and thickened with roux like any great gravy. Its tart, and colorful and goes with the ham as well as the poultry. Everything is rich. Its our version of the greatest dinner of the year.

I feel adamant in suggesting people take more time with the food. Treating it like something more important than some of the icky stuff thats put off everywhere now. It's important because the greatest indication of our culture is the food. Maybe in this way we can treat the condition by treating the symptom. Get away from rote food by looking at what our immediate cultures have provided for us, first off. What the great dishes are that our families have had for many years. And use the holidays to showcase the best of us, in great cooking that families can center around, and share.