San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
SPICE, FIRE, BLOOD. SAUSAGE.
In Puerto Rico, the timeless tradition sparks memories
Someway or another, I had found out about a man named Nando who made longaniza in the mountains of Puerto Rico. So I went to see a man about a longaniza.
I traveled out to the countryside until we reached a hillside in Naranjito.
El Rancho de Don Nando is known for its longaniza ahumadas, fresh sausages studded with oregano, garlic, pepper and achiote. Like most of the island’s beloved foods, longanizas came with the Spanish.
And like most of the independent eateries in the outlying areas of Puerto Rico, Nando’s operation is more like a series of little sheds, with the main dining room built like an enlarged wooden gazebo, framed by a corrugated metal roof and no windows or doors. It’s been here for more than 30 years, but for the last two years it has been without a phone, ever since Hurricane Maria hit.
When you walk up to the buildings, Héctor Hernán Lopez, known to all as Nando, is sitting on a metal folding chair. He is in his late 70s, he’s had two strokes and his facial features are still youthfully Germanic. He was born and raised here in Naranjito. He doesn’t do much of the work anymore, leaving most of it to his family, but he still greets every customer who arrives with a piece of morcilla and longaniza to taste.
Each makeshift room seems to be dedicated to a step in the process of creating and eating the sausages. Some rooms are decorated with nostalgic tchotchkes — license plates, horseshoes, posters, santos, cuatros. There are clear plastic bags filled with ají dulces (sweet peppers) hanging from the awning.
Wrinkly longaniza and trimmed pork shoulder dangle from a long wood closet rod. Their juices and fats drip, as smoke rises up and cloaks itself around the meat. You can see green flecks floating under the longaniza’s thin vermilion skin. There’s a large pot of arroz con longaniza — with oldfashioned medium grain rice — and another pot full of pork butt mixed in with sliced white onion. There’s an open pit where embers glow under more dangling meat.
One of the pots contains morcilla. Nando’s morcilla casing snaps
when you bite into it, giving way to the crumbly interior. Sausage preparations take place during the weekdays. The rice is placed in a big bowl, where seasoning, pork meat and pork fat are added. Hands mix and fold the seasoned rice filling, then more blood, mix and fold again. Grab a casing, shove the filling in, massage the filling to the bottom, rinse and repeat, until the morcilla turns funereal black.
The sausage process took me back to my California childhood. I remembered driving down a road lined with outdoor pig pens in the rural Yolo County countryside. Nana had gotten an urge to roast a pig for her birthday. She pointed at the one she had chosen to meet its fate. The farmer marked it with an X and the other pigs seemed to quickly separate themselves from the chosen one, the death mark leaving him exposed. This was not the first time I had encountered death, but it might have been my first time ever processing how death works: In the end, you’re on your own.
The next day we picked up the dressed pig and clumsily put it in the back of our truck. My mom, my aunt (Titi Nirda) and Nana seasoned the pig with achiote oil, sofrito and plenty of salt, their brown hands massaging, slipping and sliding across the taut rosecolored epidermis. In the refrigerator the pig went, until the morning when it would be placed onto its fiery throne.
I woke up to find Nana and Titi Nirda sitting in our backyard, facing each other from opposite sides of the spit. They both had scarves wrapped around their hair. They continuously turned the pig. Its hooves had been cut off, its legs were bound and its ears were dangling free, aching to brush themselves against the squiggly heat waves emanating from the embers.
My mom would occasionally adjust the coals with a shovel, the coals’ hot whiteness slowly overtaking their blackness until nothing was left but gray. Flecks of heat shrapnel danced into the air with every adjustment as all three women squint
ed into the hot glow and moved their heads sideways attempting to escape the heat. Salsa played in the background. Nana periodically sipped from her can of Bud Light. About 13 hours later, the pig’s skin glistened and turned golden — the skin as fragile as a piece of shattered glass. The fat underneath turns gelatinous, and biting into it is one of the most satisfying moments of being a carnivore.
Nana spoke about roasting a pig back in the motherland. It was a communal event where everyone specialized in every step of the pig’s life and death. Someone raised and cared for the pig. Someone cleaned it. Someone carried it to its designation. Someone seasoned it. Someone built the fire. Someone tied the metal wires with pliers. Someone roasted it. Someone broke it down. Everyone feasted.
In this way, I was taught how to roast a pig. But the other focus is to not waste any part of the animal.
Which brings me back to sausages. Morcillas.
Nana didn’t like adding rice to her morcilla because she said it looked like worms. I would have said maggots, but she and I were on the same page. She chopped up a bit of the pork shoulder and some milky white fat from the pig, diced it into small pieces and placed it into a bowl. Seasonings followed. The hibiscuscolored pig’s blood came cascading out of a plastic gallon milk jug, submerging some of the meat. She took the natural casing, and using a largemouth funnel shoved the mixture into the casing.
A large pot of simmering water sat on the stove. With lightning speed, hands quickly dipped the casing into the hot water, momentarily suspended it in the air, pricked the casing with pinholes and gently placed the filled casings back into their large simmering hot tub. The water started to tinge violaceous from the residual blood. After a while, the cylinders started to harden and transform into a bruised galaxy purple color. When the morcillas were finished, they were cut into pieces for sharing. Their flavor was muddied. Their interior surprisingly crumbly rather than the smooth texture of the packaged hot dogs I was accustomed to. I did not enjoy it.
It would be nearly 20 years until I ate morcilla again — and began to understand the powerful link of memory, emotion and food.
I drove to Nana’s one day, just to sit and talk. We always ended up on the subject of food, since that was our connection. I asked her how to make morcilla and she said, of course, that we should make morcilla. I started making calls immediately to track down the necessary ingredients: pig’s blood and natural casing. It was impossible. Most purveyors said they didn’t have pig’s blood until the holidays. I ended up at a neighborhood carniceria, where I bought some prepared morcilla and salsa verde.
When I brought it back to her, she was so excited. The staccato clicking of the gas range sang in the kitchen before the flame appeared under the castiron pan. She scooped a startling amount of manteca into the pan until the white caps disappeared like melting icebergs. She sliced the morcilla and placed it into the hot oil until it was fried to her liking. She placed her plate on a little stool in front of the couch; salsa verde, morcilla, tostada shells and a salt shaker. All of which she wasn’t supposed to be eating, per her doctor’s request. Her cropped hair was white and woolly. Casually dressed in a yellow sweatshirt emboldened with a bear (who also wore a sweatshirt), pale pink sweatpants, white house slippers and her oxygen tubes, she quietly assembled her bite. After she bit into her perfectly stacked curation, she released a little shoulder shake.
Nana spoke about roasting a pig back in the motherland. It was a communal event where everyone specialized in every step of the pig’s life and death. Someone raised and cared for the pig. Someone seasoned it. Someone built the fire. Someone roasted it. Someone broke it down. Everyone feasted.