The same smokehouse where Philip Joseph Sanchez got his hams also provided the hams for the elegant old San Carlos hotel, where Sanchez once worked. Grandpa's ham managed to conjure the glamour and mystery of a bygone era.

I NEVER KNEW my maternal grandfather. He died too young and I was born too late. But, since I grew up in his hometown, surrounded by people who knew him and loved him, I had a pretty good sense of who he was. One thing I learned fairly early on was that my grandfather liked to cook, and our kitchen was full of things he had used.

On one wall of my mother's kitchen hung a contraption for slicing potatoes, what today's cooks would call a mandolin, but instead of steel or plastic, this one was made of wood. We also inherited his butcher knife and the enormous wooden salad bowl in which, every Christmas and Easter, we would make a potato salad to accompany the baked ham that was always referred to as Grandpa's Ham.

Braised in beer, studded with cloves and decorated with pineapple rings and lurid red maraschino cherries, the ham was a source of delight for the approximately 40 grandchildren, including my own brothers and sisters and me, who gathered around my mother's table every Christmas. The table, which became a buffet on Christmas night, was also piled with turkey, dressing, sweet potatoes, potato salad, green beans, baked beans, squash, bread rolls, rice and gravy. But the star of the show, as far as I was concerned, was the ham.

According to my mother, Grandpa used to buy his hams from a smokehouse on Garden Street not far from where they lived in Pensacola, Fla. The same smokehouse provided hams for the hotel where my grandfather worked when my mother was a girl.

The San Carlos, which opened in 1910, was paneled with beautiful old hardwoods, and its pebble-dashed walls were punctuated with enormous leaded-glass windows. As a child, I thought it was the height of elegance.

Indeed, in its heyday, it was: it counted among its guests the great actress Sarah Bernhardt during her last visit to the United States and a young Harry Houdini during his rise to fame.

Somehow, my grandfather's ham conjured all the glamour and mystery of that bygone era. With its garish fruit decorations and its exotic spicy-sweet and smoky aroma, the ham was a blast from the Edwardian past from which both it and my grandfather came.

Since I was in the kitchen when most of those Christmas hams went into the oven, I always thought that I could reproduce one if I had to. One Christmas, feeling wistful about being so far from my Florida roots, I bought a ham, slapped some cloves and fruit on it and put it in the oven.

The pineapple rings were blackened before the meat was heated through, and the meat was edible, but not as tender and juicy as I would have liked.

Where had I gone wrong?

So many factors were involved. There was the oven temperature to think about, to cover or not to cover, how to keep that glaze from sliding off, and how to heat the ham through without burning the fruit. Then there was the matter of the ham itself. The old smokehouse where my grandfather bought his hams was long gone. So was the butcher at the A&P where my mother used to buy the hams I enjoyed as a child. Should I opt for bone-in or bone-out?

Should it be a picnic, a shoulder or a butt? Suddenly it all seemed so complicated.

I thought I had paid attention, but I had not asked the right questions.

After consulting with a stack of cookbooks and the maternal authority herself, I learned a few things. She used a whole ham to feed the enormous crowd of relatives that gathered around her table in those days, but I could make do with a fully cooked, smoked, bone-in "half ham." She kept the oven barely warm — about 250 degrees — and heated the ham all day, for six hours anyway. This allowed the ham to heat through without drying out and let the fruit caramelize without burning.

Over the years, I have gradually re-invented the ham I remember from childhood. For the best flavor, I buy a naturally raised ham, such as the Applewood Smoked Ham from Niman Ranch. At $8 a pound, it's expensive, but this a special-occasion dish. I bake it covered at 300 degrees for about an hour and a half, then I pull the cover off and garnish it with fruit. Instead of those scary maraschino cherries, I use pineapple rings canned in their own juice and frozen, pitted Bing cherries.

Greg Atkinson is a contributing editor for Food Arts magazine and a culinary consultant. He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Heather McKinnon is a Seattle Times news artist.

Serves 12, with leftovers 1 (7- to 8-pound) fully-cooked, bone-in half ham 24 whole cloves 2 (12-ounce) bottles lager beer 1 cup brown sugar 6 half-inch-thick pineapple rings 6 frozen Bing cherries 1. Bring the ham up to room temperature by removing it from the refrigerator at least an hour before baking. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Score the ham on the fatty side cutting about 1/8 inch deep in a crisscross pattern. At every intersection, poke a whole clove into the surface of the ham. 2. Place the scored ham, fatty-side-up in a 9 x 13-inch roasting pan and pour the beer into the pan around the ham. Cover the pan with baker's parchment then with aluminum foil, tucking the foil in at the edges of the pan to create a seal. Bake the ham until an instant-read thermometer registers 110 degrees when inserted into the meatiest part of the ham, about 2½ hours. 3. Remove the ham from the oven, take it out of the pan and pour the juices that have accumulated in the pan into a small saucepan. Ladle off any excess fat and stir in the brown sugar over medium heat until the sugar is dissolved to make a glaze. 4. Put the ham back in the pan. Arrange the pineapple rings over the surface of the ham, put a cherry in the center of each pineapple ring and secure the rings and cherries in place with toothpicks. Pour the glaze over the surface of the decorated ham. Put the ham back in the oven and bake, uncovered, until the fruit is heated through and the glaze is caramelized, about 30 minutes. Copyright, Greg Atkinson, 2004