The Recipe
It’s sugar and salt. And manteca. There’s also the work and the constancy. But you pour the sugar into the cazo first. Get it from the recycled plastic container labeled AZÚCAR in black Sharpie. Set fire to a ball of crushed newspaper. Place it on the burner before you light it. Then retreat to the propane tank and twist the valve open, slowly. Heft the cazo into place over the flames. Wait for the heat. If it’s predawn (it is), you’ll feel it emanating from the copper soon. Now, pour the sugar. Eyeball the glistening pyramid of pork butts sliced into polygons. Consider the island of sugar you’ve created as it morphs. Consider the plastic container and the streaks of ink scrawled in your grandfather’s hand. Decide whether you need to add more sugar to the pot.
The copper will purple. Use a palo to kick the caramelizing sugar toward the purplest blossoms. The sugar will froth and threaten to scab over. The smoke will rush toward your eyes. Don’t let it burn to black. Grab the pyramid of meat and dump it inside. As long as you don’t splash yourself, you’re doing it right. Your grandfather learned to do this from his father alongside his brothers. They all sold carnitas. They all thought their product was the best. But your grandfather’s was the best. In the nineties, a restaurateur offered him some thousands of dollars to teach the recipe to his kitchen staff. Your grandfather refused. Declining money was unlike him. He was an interwar baby. A bracero in his youth. Lots of cooks make a big show of adding Coca-Cola or sliced oranges to the pot; you won’t be doing that with yours. Move the palo in the cazo. Rotate the hunks of pork. Wrap them in the caramelized sugar.
Grab the other plastic container, the one labeled SAL. Shake it out over the meat. Give it a coat, at least. No need to mix it in. Add enough to balance the amount of sugar you’re using or to tilt the flavor profile one way or the other, as you please, by adding more or less. But pay attention to what you’re doing. The recipe, really, is: Do it for forty years. Do it so often that your actions and their results and your identity become entwined. Your grandfather was missing the tip of one of his fingers because that’s how much meat he cut. You were excited to meet Ronnie Lott at the mall when you were four years old because you knew he had asked the 49ers medical staff to amputate the tip of his left pinkie after he crushed it during a tackle, and he didn’t want to miss the start of the 1986 season due to injury. Near the end of his career, he autographed the gray fabric on your L.A. Raiders fleece with a black Sharpie, and you looked and you looked, but you couldn’t discern anything strange about any of his fingers.
Next, dump your manteca into the cazo. Lift with your legs or a partner. Add enough to cover the meat. Then clutch the valve of the propane tank with your fingertips and expand or contract the aperture feeding gas to the burner through the hose. Your grandfather would say that you want big bubbles in the fat. He wasn’t your hero or anything. All your heroes are queers and suicides, and he was the polar opposite of all that. He took you to work with him. He scarred your hand with sugar. He talked about his sisters, and he talked about Dixon, California. He talked about your grandmother, and you did not interrupt him. He liked slick suits and lottery tickets and cars. He liked Olympia brand beer and baseball and boxing. He worked more than he did anything else. You weren’t even that close except you were always together. Until now. Time passed, and your grandfather died, and so did George Foreman.
The meat needs to boil for an hour or so. Your carnitas are done if they come apart when you tear at them. Remember to stir the pot every so often, scraping the bottom. You probably don’t have access yet to any manteca as thick and rich as your grandfather’s. It really is the work, the rituals, and the constancy. That’s always been apparent to you. In any event, do your best with what you have. And that’s it. That’s the recipe.
