I bought my father a record player for his 60th birthday. It’s a gray, retro-style Crosley standing on long black legs, like a whooping crane, looking out over our kitchen in Atlanta. I also included three starter records I knew he would love — “Crosby, Stills & Nash,” “Let It Be” and “Hotel California” — because they contain the signature songs he sang at karaoke my whole life. My father, the crooner, is always the life of the party, the class clown. My mother calls him a yes man, which she thinks means someone who says “yes” anytime he’s asked to hang out, which my father does. He loves fun, and as someone who also loves fun, I wanted him to have a record player for whenever his friends come over to play cards. Sometimes I can hear it in my dreams: John Lennon and Paul McCartney harmonizing over the clinking glasses of soju with lime juice from a plastic green bottle.
Since that birthday a few years ago, we put the record player on whenever we’re in the kitchen, which is often, especially during the holidays. I might be baking cookies or preparing Christmas dinner — always a big glazed ham — or making cottage-cheese pancakes in the morning. When my mother is sitting at the kitchen island with her coffee before the rest of us wake up, it’s Joan Baez. When my brother Kevin is whipping up a cocktail before dinner, it’s Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald. When I’m baking a loaf of milk bread at midnight, alone, it’s Johnny Cash or Elvis — a little bit of country, a little bit of rock. It’s my father’s Crosley, but we all benefit from it.
I am not a religious person, but I revere Christmastime as a secular season centered on food and family — two of my favorite things. As with any family tradition, there are rules. My father expects a ham every year. Last Christmas, I was so busy and burned out from the pandemic that I never got around to making one. So this year, I want to be sure I come home with an excellent ham recipe, though I shouldn’t call this my recipe. When it comes to matters of cured pork, I’ve picked up things along the way from various cooks. But the recipe that has inspired me the most is Nigella Lawson’s. Her ham in cola is a treasure of a dish that calls for boiling a gammon in two liters of Coca-Cola, with an onion chucked in for mellow savoriness. The caramel-tinged ham is then lacquered with molasses, dark like licorice and dusted with spicy English mustard powder and crunchy demerara sugar.
Using a little soda in your ham glaze is an old art, but boiling your ham in two liters of soda may be a more recent practice. The first two-liter bottle wasn’t invented until the early 1970s, when Pepsi came out with one. This must have paved the way for boiling your ham in soda, whether that was the more classic Pepsi or Coca-Cola, or the quirkier Dr Pepper, cherry soda or ginger ale. In “Cooking Across the South,” a Southern Living cookbook from 1980, a recipe for “country ham” calls for two ingredients: the ham, plus four quarts of ginger ale. As far as I can tell, cooking ham in sugary soda has two aims: to impart all those spicy-sweet flavors, while simultaneously softening the inherent, often overly harsh saltiness of the cured meat.
This Christmas, I want to try something different, and to surprise my father, so I’ll cook a ham in root beer instead. The sarsaparilla flavor in root beer lends the meat a woodsy mintiness, which sings when it’s paired with aromatics like bay leaves and shallots. Usually, when I’m home in Atlanta, I don’t have a problem finding a pot big enough to boil a bone-in half ham in soda. (My mother inherited a bunch of stainless-steel caldrons from her mother-in-law, my grandmother.) But while testing this recipe in my shoe-box studio apartment in Manhattan, I found that setting the salty beast in a large roasting pan with root beer poured into the bottom, then covering it with foil and baking it low and slow, was a grand, hands-off way to imbue the pork with the caramel-dark nuances of the drink. And, in that steamy environment, the ham didn’t dry out either.
But here’s the real fun: I like to take some of that root-beer braising liquid and reduce it in a separate skillet until it’s thick and syrupy to make a base for a glaze. Sticky like tar and richly savory in taste, this glaze gets its body and spice from Dijon mustard, its molasses-rich sweetness from brown sugar and its high note, the kind of flavor that floats on top like a finely tuned piccolo in an orchestra, from a touch of rice vinegar.
As much as I love Christmas, it’s the days after that I cherish the most. If you plunk the hambone into a pot of water with a halved onion and boil it for a couple of hours, you’ll be rewarded with a deep, sultry broth. Give yourself yet another reward (it’s the holidays, after all) by turning that broth into congee, what we Koreans call juk: Cook it with some leftover rice and ham, especially the fatty pieces near the bone, and stir in a couple of egg yolks for richness. This is ham and eggs the long way, and it’ll change your life.
One year for Christmas, I took my family to Portland, Maine. We didn’t have Dad’s Crosley there, but we played the same albums from our phones and stuck to our ham-centric menu. The holidays look different to everyone, but here’s what they look like to me: the entire family together in the kitchen, with Louis Armstrong’s raspy vocals overlaying the scene, a powerful memory that has become a feeling I can summon with the flick of a record needle. And it’s not just in December that you can feel this way, the weight of the world lifted for one brief moment. If you own a record player, that time-traveling device, then you can have Christmas in January, July, September. Even better if you cook a ham.
Recipe: Root-Beer Ham
