NYTable

The bouncing ham: A tale of huge pork-portions

May 4th, 2017  |  Published in What we savor

food

The author cooking cookies with her grandmother – who had much more patience in the kitchen than her mother – in 2008. Photo: Stacey Churchill.

I wouldn’t say my mother was an inventive cook.

Well, honestly, I wouldn’t say she was a cook at all. A woman more at home in the garden than the kitchen, more comfortable with dirt on her hands than flour, she was never subtle about her distaste for making food, as my brother and I were growing up.

So how we ended up in the following position, I will never know.

It was midmorning on Easter Sunday, 2008. My mother’s family was full of reluctant Catholics who used holidays as an excuse to drink and stay home. In my memory, we had never before thought of holidays as a family affair. Yet I found myself this morning in a small kitchen surrounded by aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins.

Earlier in the day, I hid to avoid various relatives who meandered through the kitchen to offer unsolicited advice to my frantic mother and refill a glass. The spread was huge, with the old, easy-to-make classics ready: fruit salad, rolls, sausages. The plank wooden table my dad had made as soon as we moved to Virginia was covered in a mismatch of colored napkins and random pottery. The walls, a pale, pleasant yellow, provided a happy, springy and appropriate backdrop for the event. The cause for concern was not yet known, but lurked in the oven.

Who knows, again, where the recipe came from. If my mom ever cooked anything, it was an old standard that she knew by heart and could plop onto the table in under half an hour, to minimal complaints. This, however, was an entirely novel idea: a whole ham boiled, or roasted, or something, in a few cans of Coke and apparently nothing else.

The ham basted itself into a carbonated glory until it emerged towards the end of the meal, when apparently meat is brought out (though I only know this from movies like It’s a Wonderful Life – the ones where Jimmy Stewart looks beatifically over his Norman Rockwell meal to his well-coiffed and perfectly behaved children. A blonde apron-clad mother is smiling lovingly behind them.). My mother brought the ham out, raised apparently triumphantly, on a platter… only… it didn’t look quite right.

It was bright pink, for one thing. Bubble gum pink. Unholy, decidedly un-pork-ly pink. And it was oddly and solidly jiggly, sort of like a thick Jell-o. It didn’t look like anything I had ever seen, much less put into my mouth.

A few fixed-smile relatives gingerly peeled off a piece or two. Perhaps they thought they would be kicked out after the meal if they didn’t pretend to enjoy it. I, for one, avoided the stuff, making solemn eye contact with the opposite wall. There was an attempt made, on my relatives’ part, to chew. An awkward silence descended.

All of a sudden, someone started laughing. Who knows who it was, anymore. The laughter soon spread. My mother, who maybe didn’t even realize how unappetizing the ham was, looked around, confused. She took a small bite and looked up in revulsion.

The laughter spread until my brother, never one to mince words when a good old fashioned demonstration was in order, picked up a hunk of the meat and hurled it at the ground – where it promptly bounced, making a sickly splotching noise. I will never forget the sight of that ham, vibrating like a glistening tuning fork in slow motion.

The laughter exploded at that point. I remember wondering if my mother’s eyes were full of tears from laughter, or from her abject failure at the piece de résistance of the meal. Perhaps it was both. It would be her last attempt to bake herself into a creative splendor at any family event – or any event, for that matter.

As for me, the bouncing pink ham will always stand in a beacon like my mind of how hysterical my family is, and what a good sense of humor my mother has. From then on, holidays were a time for family gathering – a time when stories like this one are told over raucous laughter and a drink or two. Only one rule – keep my mom out of the kitchen.

Tags: , , , ,

Your Comments