The Christmas Ham

The Greenwood Family Christmas has always included a ham, and since about 1971 it has been prepared according to the instructions of the December issue of Gourmet Magazine from the same year. This recipe, for "Stuffed Braised Ham," involves drilling little holes all over a ham, filling the holes with pistachio nuts, port-soaked raisins and breadcrumbs before giving the exterior a little cinnamon-sugar rub and then dousing the whole darn thing with the rest of the bottle of port before throwing it (the ham, not the empty port bottle) into the oven to bubble away magically for a few hours, after which it's transported across town still in the roasting pan now wrapped in blankets to the appointed Christmas Dinner house.

Somewhere in the last 10 years when a lot of our Christmas traditions were slowly changing and morphing into others, Scott and I took on the tradition of the Christmas Ham including the traditional Gourmet recipe. Scott, who thinks the mere idea of a ham (let alone stuffed) is a brilliant one, has embraced this tradition wholeheartedly.

This year Scott ordered the ham from Oyama Sausage Co. who in turn highly recommended the boned Swedish Ham, which is fairly different from a standard issue ham in that it's uncooked. Now the challenge became to merge our traditional recipe into a preparation of pork which looked very different from what was originally intended (I believe Scott used the words "diametrically opposed.")

Instead of drilling the ham with holes we filled the boneless centre cavity with stuffing, and owing to it's already moist consistency we decided to skip the 'dousing-with-port' part and proceed with baking instead of braising.

The result was one fine ham - moist, flavourful, delicious - but not without room for improvement (we did miss the port-soaked flavour.) So Scott and I have decided we may need to schedule a couple of 'test-ham-events' for 2009 so that we can perfect our ham techniques before next Christmas dinner.

With that in mind, feel free to send an email if you like to be included on our test event invite list: the more, the merrier!