Ham and Bean Soup

Around the Christmas holidays in the Philippines we would cook a large dried ham.  This ham is a whole salt cured ham, smoked and dried imported from China. And because it is almost mummified it took forever and a day to boil it in a conglomeration of water, beer, pineapple juice, cloves, cinnamon, Seven Up, and I don’t know what else.  When it was done, the skin peeled off very easily.  Then they burned brown sugar on the fat with a red-hot spatula like using a brand-iron to finish it off.

The meat is red from being cured and very hard. One can only eat a small, sliced or shaved paper-thin piece of the meat sandwiched in bread because it is extremely salty.  It is in no way like the American cured ham that one eats a large thick slice of.  The salt cured Virginia ham is not even close compared to it.

This ham is imported from China and is a traditional Christmas holiday dinner treat in Manila area and other bigger cities in the Philippines but it is only affordable to people who can. This ham is not allowed in the USA for some reason I don’t know.

Papa sawed off the hock before the ham was boiled and used it to cook with Navy beans or Northern beans sometime after the holidays for another meal. He also cut-up the cooked and peeled off skin and used some of it in with the beans. I don’t think everybody knew how to make this and used the sawed off ham hock because my ex-husband’s family didn’t know what to do with the hock.  They just threw it away. 

I showed my ex-mother-in-law eons ago how to cook the ham hock with Navy or Northern beans that would otherwise be thrown away.  They liked it.

Here in Texas, Pinto beans, sometimes called Red Beans is a common southern country dish. The dish is also commonly called red beans and is usually eaten with rice and/or cornbread, hence inaptly called Red Beans and Rice and not to be confused with the same name but different dish from Louisiana or the Caribbean. Texas Pinto beans is cooked much the same as my father’s recipe except the garlic and onions are not sauted and they don’t add tomatoes or paprika in it. Surprisingly they taste similar.

My father also added “paminton” in his beans, which I could not find here in the U.S. when I first lived here. Much later on, I realized that “paminton” in the Philippines is the same as paprika here, which is very common.

Recipe: