Noche Buena

Noche Buena

By Sarah Baird

Like many families with Italian roots, the Acosta clan gathers for a Christmas Eve feast filled with joy and pasta. For years, it was Cindy Rouse Acosta’s father, Anthony J. Rouse Sr., who made the meal’s centerpiece — a heaping pot of spaghetti and meatballs.

Mr. Anthony’s father had immigrated to the United States from Sardinia in 1900 and opened a produce business, thereby laying the bedrock on which today’s Rouses Markets was built. (The company still remains familyowned as it stretches across the Gulf Coast.) Mr. Anthony passed away in 2009, and his daughter, Cindy, has since taken up the ladle, making the spaghetti that is as much a part of Christmas Eve for her family as the decorated tree and piles of presents.

But into this festa Italiana has now come a new tradition, a culinary interloper with its own rich ancestral roots, deep family lore and a new generation ready to carry it forward: a classic Cuban flan.

The purveyor of this newcomer is Gloria Acosta, the wife of Chris Acosta, Mr. Anthony’s grandson. Gloria’s mother, Dora Johnson, grew up in Cuba until her family was forced to flee Fidel Castro’s brutal regime in the 1960s. Since then, cherished family recipes have kept them anchored to the island in ways that only food and memory can.

CUBAN FLAN Dora was just 11 on Epiphany, Jan. 6, 1967, when she and her family left Havana behind. They arrived in Miami, where they stayed about a year and a half before making their way to New York.

Dora, a nurse, eventually married and moved to Baton Rouge, where her husband was a professor at LSU. When she settled in Louisiana’s Capitol, Dora brought the flavors of Cuba with her, having learned to cook from both of her parents.

“They made all kinds of Spanish Cuban food,” she said. “My mom was very good at Cuban tamales; she used ground pork, boiled the whole corn, and used the leaves for the tamales. My father is also a very good cook, he helped my mother’s cooking grow with his stomach.” A seafood paella is quickly mentioned when Dora and her daughter Gloria share memories of Abuelo’s cooking.

But few recipes are as treasured — or as rich — as the family’s flan, a dessert with an amazing alchemical balance of milky and sweet. It makes appearances on festive occasions, birthdays and holidays. Dora can

recite the recipe from recall, and, though she’s precise on ingredients, the steps come with built-in muscle memory. “My flan is my mother’s flan,” she said. “I can’t tell you exactly when it’s ready. You just know it when you see it.”

Though she adds her own touch — drizzling the finished flan with cognac after it’s flipped out of the pan — Dora adheres close to tradition with most steps of the recipe. There’s comfort in knowing that, even in this ever-changing world, some things are perfect just the way they are.

While Dora remains the chief flan-maker in the family, Gloria has often joined her in the kitchen. When Dora broke her wrist in 2021, Gloria stepped into the culinary breach. The flan made it to Christmas Eve without fail.

LA NOCHE BUENA The Italians and the Cubans have at least one thing in common during the holidays: Both groups traditionally celebrate on Christmas Eve. La Vigilia di Natale in Italy and La Noche Buena in Cuba are when extended families gather and the feast is laid.

In Cuba, gifts were not traditionally part of the festivities on La Noche Buena, and presents weren’t brought by Santa Claus. They arrived with the Magi. Gifts were exchanged on El Dia de Los Reyes — the Day of the Three Kings, Jan. 6. (This is the same holiday as Twelfth Night.)

For many Cubans, La Noche Buena is one of the most festive nights of the year, a celebration when the best cooks in each family get to show off their skills. Drinking, dancing and eating stretch through the night until the church bells ring, beckoning everyone to head to Midnight Mass. The next day, Christmas is quieter, a welcome chance to snooze off the exertions of the prior evening.

The star of La Noche Buena is the lechon asado, a whole pig, long marinaded and garlic spiked, wrapped in banana leaves and roasted, often in the backyard. Accompanying the roasted pork are traditional Cuban fare: the black beans and rice poetically called moros y cristianos; tostones, those addictive savory fried plantains; and yuca con mojo sauteed in garlic.

Crèma de Vie, a more potent, rum-laced version of eggnog, lubricates the festivities, while buñuelos, powder-sugar-dusted Cuban-style beignets, force everyone to save room for dessert.

A New York Times reporter once described La Noche Buena in terms that American appetites could quickly understand, saying it combined the “belt-loosening largess of Thanksgiving with the conviviality of a Fourth of July barbecue.”

Dora and other Cubans who left as children have rich memories of Christmas on the island, keeping the decorations up until Jan. 6 when the presents arrived. But after 1959, when the Communist party took power, everything changed — and Christmas was no exception. A deeply Catholic country for centuries, religion was suddenly outlawed, and in 1962, the Cuban government deemed anyone associated with Catholicism an agent against the revolution.

In 1969, the Communist government made the ground-shaking decision to ban the public celebration of Christmas. “Even private Christmas trees and decorations were regarded with suspicion,” reported The New York Times. “All people were required to work on Christmas Day, ostensibly on the ground that religious trivialities could not be allowed to interfere in sugar production.”

Things began to slowly change again in the 1990s, thanks almost entirely to a five-day visit by Pope John Paul II in January 1998. “Castro attended nearly every papal event and sat in the front row at Masses,” Reuters reported on the Pope’s monumental trip, which “galvanized the local church, infusing it with more courage to stand up to the communist government on human rights abuses and to press for the release of political prisoners.”

In the years since Pope John Paul II’s visit, Christmas has remained a recognized religious holiday in Cuba. And since 2015, when there was a visit from Pope Francis, Catholicism has rebounded, “gradually expanding its role and influence after suffering repression for decades,” Reuters reported. “It now has more autonomy than any organization outside the auspices of the Communist party.”

For many Cuban families who left more than half a century ago, telling stories of life on the island, sharing memories from one generation to the next, and, of course, cooking favorite recipes, keeps them grounded in a vibrant culture that has withstood unfathomable hardships — and survived.

And that leads us back to flan, a dessert so beloved that “it’s not rare to find an all-flan (dessert) lineup — de leche, de queso, de calabaza, and, of course, de coco” in Cuban restaurants, writes Ana Sofia Pelaez, author of The Cuban Table, A Celebration of Food, Flavors, and History, published by St. Martin Press and nominated for a James Beard Award in the international cookbook category.

“The trick to a great Flan de Leche begins and ends with the caramelo — the sugar heated slowly over a steady flame until it reaches just the right amber hue without becoming bitter,” writes Pelaez, whose recipes also can be found on the website HungrySofia.com. Her flan recipe calls for cooking the caramel for five to eight minutes, watching it carefully while the sugar melts. “It can get away from you easily, but it’s always fun to see how far you can take it.”

Dora also advises keeping a close watch on the pan as the caramel is cooking, swirling it so it coats the bottom of the pan completely, then following the rest of her recipe’s steps. (Don’t miss her recipe below!)

Once it’s perfectly cooled, it’s time for the flipping of the flan. At the Rouse family Christmas Eve party, Chris Acosta often has the pleasure of doing the honors. “I’d say, I’ve now flipped it about five or six times,” he said. “No mishaps, but I’m always very cautious because I don’t want any mistakes on my part!”

As the flan cools, it can create a seal with the pan. So, after the flan is fully cooled, run a knife around the edges to loosen it from the pan. When ready to flip, gently tap the pan to further loosen it. Then place a plate on top and invert the pan; the custard should slide out while still holding its form.

If done right, it’s worthy of a celebration — the perfect sweet finish for a spaghetti feast.