Pernil is the beloved star of Puerto Rican holiday dinners in Philly and beyond

There’s one joke Nasheli Ortiz González always hears circulating among her fellow Puerto Ricans about making pernil: Keep seasoning it until your ancestors scream at you.

“It’s to that level, for me, that food connects us with our background,” González said.

That’s especially true for González when she makes pernil, a well-seasoned pork shoulder slowly roasted for hours until the meat reaches tender, juicy perfection on the inside, and gets a crackly crisp skin on the outside. It’s a staple on Puerto Rican tables for Christmas and Three Kings Day.

González grew up in Caguas, Puerto Rico, where making pernil was a thorough process from the very start — catching, blessing, killing and cleaning the pig — to the finish. It was a group effort for González’s family: the women would clean the tripas, or small intestines, to make longaniza, while the men would finish preparing the pig to be slowly roasted on a stick outside. At home, she would spend days eating pernil at different family members’ homes, amusedly watching her aunts argue over whose cuerito — or crispy skin — was best.

It wasn’t until she moved to the U.S. 13 years ago that González, out of necessity, made her own pernil for the first time — because it wouldn’t be Christmas without it. She called her mom in a panic, who calmly walked her through the instructions: cut holes in the shoulder, stuff them with sofrito and massage the shoulder before marinating it overnight; don’t put too much garlic! What González’s mom didn’t prepare her for was the grocery store. As she approached the butcher’s counter, González realized she didn’t know the English word for pernil.

“I was pointing to my [shoulder] and saying, ‘This part of the pig!’” she recalled in laughter.

But that was the moment González first started to really appreciate pernil: “Being alone my first Christmas with my kids, and trying to preserve that thing that nobody understood but us.”

Everyone has a certain ritual when making pernil. Walk into Yolanda Roman’s kitchen, and you’ll hear Puerto Rican music blasting as the smells of sofrito and adobo stick to the air.

You’ll also find much more than just pernil. Christmas in Puerto Rico isn’t complete without tostones, bacalao (salty cod salad), pasteles (green banana and plantain masa, filled with pork and steamed in banana leaves), arroz con dulce (sweet rice flavored with cinnamon and speckled with raisins), and, of course, coquito (a creamy coconut milk-based holiday rum drink).

Roman had gotten her pork shoulder from Cousin’s, where pernil always has the skin on it (unlike typical supermarkets), and is readily available in a stacked tower for the high demand of the season. She slapped the pale pink slab of meat into an aluminum pan before expertly cutting holes into it (except for the skin, you never pierce the skin), then hand-scooped her marinade into and around the holes. Within minutes, the meat went from pale pink to bright orange with the marinade, seasoned with adobo, garlic, ground annatto seeds, spices such as cumin, and, of course, sofrito — an aromatic base used in many Latin dishes. Roman admits that, to the dismay of her mother, she doesn’t always make her sofrito from scratch. “But you can doctor it up!” Roman argues back.

Once the pernil was ready, she fashioned thick rings out of aluminum foil and placed them at the bottom of the pan as a platform for the meat, allowing for heat to circulate under it. The oven beeped — it had been preheated to the 500 degrees at which she would roast the pernil for the first half hour to achieve a crispy cuerito.

As the skin crisped, Roman began reminiscing on holidays spent in Puerto Rico, occasionally reaching her hand up to touch her necklace of the Puerto Rican flag in the shape of the island: spending days visiting family members, celebrating nonstop from Christmas until Three Kings, decorations and Latin music in every square in town.

Cooking the traditional foods, she says, “evokes a sentimental journey — that’s what my mom cooked, what my aunts cooked, and you’ll eat it all December long, all the way through Three Kings.”

“It ties you back to the island,” Roman said.

She interrupted herself midsentence to open the oven door, unleashing the crackling sounds of the pig skin hardening. She’s trying to pass the recipes she learned from her mother down to her children, nieces and nephews, and grandchildren. But that intuition, of feeling when the skin has crisped enough and it’s time to turn down the oven temperature for the rest of the roast, can’t be taught. It only comes with practice.

About four hours later, Roman removes the pernil from the oven and knocks on its hardened, shell-like skin with a knife, so that it emits a hollow sound. It’s ready. The cuerito crunches as she snaps it away, a billow of steam rising from the tender, juice-dripping meat underneath. When there are large gatherings, Roman said, half of the cuerito is gone before people sit down at the table, because it’s best fresh. She bites into a piece with a loud crackle. Perfection. Like González, Roman started making her own pernil when she started her own family in the ‘80s, after years of watching her mother’s methods. It took some trial and error, but the student eventually surpassed the master: About 10 years ago, Roman’s mother started preferring her daughter’s pernil over her own.

Jessie Cruz, on the other hand, made her first pernil when she was 12 years old, after years of dutifully watching and helping her grandmother in the kitchen for years. It wasn’t perfect — she took it out too early — but the flavor was just right. She didn’t master pernil until her first child was born in the U.S., and she wanted to establish the tradition of a Puerto Rican Christmas in her Philadelphia home.

“It always meant something to me to keep our culture and tradition,” said Cruz, who moved to Philly from Puerto Rico in 1991. “Even though I’m far from Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico still lives in me.”

Years later, Cruz’s children now make pernil themselves, which they learned from watching Cruz and her other relatives growing up. And it’s not just the recipe that gets passed down, but the cooking habits. Cruz chuckles as she watches her children poke their fingers in their marinade to test it — the same as she does, and the same thing she used to watch her uncles when she was growing up.

And while holding on to that culture and tradition through food is important to Cruz, it’s always been about the bigger picture.

“It’s the family coming together, all the different types of dishes that we bring to the table,” Cruz said. “It’s not just the food that we’re going to bring together, but also that spirit that brings life into our souls as well.”