Kitchen Yarns Read online

  I watched everyone as they cut their chicken and brought it to their lips.

  “What is this?” one of the guys asked, surprised.

  “Chicken Marbella,” I managed to say.

  “This is amazing,” he said, shoving more into his mouth.

  The women were nodding in agreement. People were taking seconds. And thirds. Even without the wine, the Chicken Marbella was a success. I couldn’t ruin it.

  Over the next fifteen years, these same couples came to my house again and again. I have served them spaghetti carbonara from my own recipe. Steak with chimichurri sauce. Beef tenderloin with blue cheese. I have served my family these things too, and so much more. Homemade gnocchi. Beef fajitas and thick lentil soup and brined pork chops.

  But still, there are days when perhaps I feel nostalgic for a time that was simpler and cooking seemed like a wild adventure. Days when I feel overwhelmed by responsibility and burden, by the complications of middle age. Days when I take my third copy of The Silver Palate from the shelf and find the page with Lemon Chicken, or Black Bean Soup, or, yes, Chicken Marbella. I run my hand over the sticky cookbook. I read the familiar words. I cook.

  CHICKEN MARBELLA

  Adapted from The Silver Palate Cookbook, by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins

  One of the best things about this recipe is that you set everything up the night before you want to serve it, which not only keeps you out of the kitchen and sipping cocktails with everyone else but also allows the chicken to soak up all the yummy marinade. Also, you can serve it at room temperature. That means you can bake it before your guests arrive—I always think of it as a perfect dish for a dinner party, though of course it’s a lovely meal anytime—and have it all ready, waiting on a pretty platter.

  A word of warning: although, as I’ve just recounted, I have always thought of Chicken Marbella as a no-fail dish, I actually messed it up recently. Once in over thirty years is a pretty good record, but still when it came out less than wonderful, I was shocked. Here’s what happened. I fell madly in love with a guy who also happens to be a cook trained by the CIA—not the Central Intelligence Agency but the Culinary Institute of America—and the author of more than twenty cookbooks and books about chefs and the art of cooking. In other words, I was terrified of cooking for him. One night I made him a pretty mediocre cacio e pepe, one of the most basic pasta preparations—just cheese and black pepper—which is very hard to make well. You will note that there is no recipe for cacio e pepe in this book. The next time I had the misfortune to make him dinner, I decided to forgo something hard and go for easy but dazzling—in other words, Chicken Marbella. I prepped it the night before he arrived and had at the ready the finishing touch of chopped parsley to sprinkle on top. After cocktails and cheese and crackers on the roof, we came back inside for dinner. But my perfect, no-fail Chicken Marbella failed. The chicken wasn’t crisp; the sauce was too sweet. In the middle of the night I woke up remembering I’d forgotten to add the olives, which still sat on the kitchen counter, next to the ramekin of chopped parsley.

  So do not attempt this recipe if you are madly in love.

  Otherwise, it will never fail you.

  Serves 10

  INGREDIENTS

  2 to 3 pounds chicken (I like breasts, but mixed parts are better for dinner parties)

  ½ cup olive oil

  ½ cup red wine vinegar

  ½ cup pitted prunes

  ½ cup pitted apricots

  ½ cup capers

  ½ cup green olives (even the jarred ones with pimientos work nicely)

  Cloves from one head of garlic, peeled and crushed lightly with the back of a knife

  A scant ¼ cup dried oregano

  Salt and pepper to taste

  ½ cup brown sugar

  ½ to ⅓ cup white wine

  ¼ cup chopped flat-leaf parsley

  The night before serving this dish, put the chicken in the roasting pan you will cook it in and add the olive oil, red wine vinegar, prunes, apricots, capers, olives, garlic, oregano, salt, and pepper. Mix it all up so the chicken is well coated. Using your hands is acceptable, even preferred. Make sure you don’t try to cut corners and skip the marinating step. Rosso and Lukins tell us that it is essential to the moistness of the chicken, and I believe them. So should you.

  The chicken will take about an hour to cook. If you are going to serve it at room temperature (my favorite way), preheat the oven to 350 degrees F around four o’clock the next afternoon. If you want to serve it hot, start the preheating an hour or so before dinner.

  Mix up the chicken and marinade again, then sprinkle the chicken with the brown sugar and pour the wine around, not over, the chicken.

  The chicken is done when its juices run clear, in about an hour.

  Put the chicken with the prunes, apricots, and olives on your prettiest platter. Spoon some of the pan juices on it and sprinkle with parsley. The rest of the juices can be served separately in your gravy boat.

  I like to serve Chicken Marbella with couscous—it soaks up all those juices.

  The Best Fried Chicken

  I have massaged it with herbs. Bathed it in buttermilk. Immersed it in water, sugar, and salt. Rolled it in corn flakes, panko, seasoned crumbs. I have spent three days tending to it, double-dipping and double-dredging and double-bathing. Ham has been involved. Also, hot pepper flakes. But now I know that the finest way to make fried chicken is to dust it with heavily salted and peppered flour and fry it in lard until crisp. That’s the way my father did it, and his mother before him. That’s the way they still do it in his part of Indiana, which is to say the southeast corner, whose Hoosiers are more Kentucky than Midwest. But like all children when they grow up, I doubted and questioned him and his chicken. I grew too sophisticated, and turned away from everything I’d once believed to be true. I tasted too many others that had been fried by the likes of Edna Lewis and Sean Brock. I forgot the crunch of that Indiana chicken, its moistness and peppery kick. I forgot until a yearning for people and things I no longer knew forced me backward, and brought me home.

  I have read that Virginia Woolf’s earliest memory is of a close-up view of the pattern of flowers on her mother’s dress on a train trip to St. Ives. The Scottish poet Edwin Muir’s first memory was of his gold-and-scarlet baptism suit. American historian Henry Adams remembered the yellow of a kitchen bathed in sunlight. Tolstoy’s first memory is of being swaddled and crying out for freedom. Me, I remember fried chicken.

  I was three, or maybe four, lying on my back in what we called the way back of our green Chevy station wagon, watching the trees that lined the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia speed past. Every weekend we would get in that station wagon and take a long drive. To the Luray Caverns or Monticello or a glass factory outlet somewhere in West Virginia. And always on these day trips there was a picnic, eaten at a picnic table beneath mountain pines. Always potato salad, bread and butter, plums and peaches. Always fried chicken. My brother, Skip, older by five years, tall and solid (our mother bought his clothes in the husky section at Heck’s department store), wore his hair in a summer buzz cut and a striped shirt. A Four Seasons song played on the radio—“Rag Doll” or “Big Girls Don’t Cry”—and my mother sang along softly and off-key from the front seat. My father drove. His left arm, the one with the tattoo of an eagle in front of a blazing-red setting sun, rested on the sill of the open window, and his fine blond hair fluttered in the hot breeze.

  We four were displaced. I didn’t know it then, but ever since they’d married, a decade earlier, my parents had been moving at the whim of the U.S. Navy, for whom my father was a proud Seabee. They’d lived in Naples, Italy, and Annapolis, Maryland, with long stretches in between when my father was at sea. My mother was homesick for her small hometown in Rhode Island, for the house where her mother still lived, for the nearness of her sisters and brothers, most of them within walking distance of that house on Fiume Street where they’d all been born. I didn’t know that she was still g
rieving the sudden loss of her favorite sister, Ann-Marie, who had died six years earlier during a routine wisdom tooth extraction. I only knew that my mother had those sad brown eyes, and that it wasn’t uncommon for me to walk down the long hall of our apartment and find her staring out the window and crying. To me, my world was that apartment in Arlington, Virginia, and my family was the four of us—Mom, Dad, Skip, and me.

  So I am on my back in the way back of our green Chevy station wagon, and my brother with his buzz cut and striped shirt is beside me, both of our heads on the pillows taken from our beds, and we are staring out at the trees rushing past us. Then the car slows and everything out the window is brilliant blue and green. My father parks and takes a red cooler with a white lid from the back seat. He opens the wide door of the way back and we crawl out. My mother, in a pretty red dress, has already hurried to the wooden picnic table, which is painted green. When she sees us spill out of the car, she smiles, and opens the white lid of the cooler, and pulls from it a large yellow bowl.

  “Fried chicken,” she says.

  It is fried chicken made from my father’s recipe, which is to say Indiana Fried Chicken. No buttermilk. No spices. No brining. The chicken is simply dusted with heavily salted and peppered flour, then fried in lard. It is crispy and moist and the best fried chicken in the world. I am three years old, wearing a dress covered in a pattern of yellow flowers, running toward my mother. And the world is perfect.

  IN HER ESSAY “A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf links the memory of her mother’s flowered dress to a memory of lying in bed in the nursery in St. Ives and listening to the sound of the ocean, on that same trip to St. Ives from London. But Woolf admits that the light in the train of this memory is such that the journey was an evening one, which means that it was not on the way to St. Ives but rather from St. Ives on their return to London. Therefore the memory of lying in bed and listening to the sea can’t be right, an inconvenient fact that questions the veracity of her early memories, and their connection to each other. But Woolf wrote, “If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills—then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory.”

  What, then, of my own earliest memory, the one on which my own bowl stands? Although this particular picnic on this particular day is not part of my family’s lore, what I remember happening later is this: It’s dark, and we are heading home to Virginia from wherever we spent the day, still full of fried chicken. The car smells of the lemony moist towelettes my mother carries in her purse for us to wipe our hands with after eating. My brother has fallen asleep beside me, and I am now watching the pattern the streetlights make as we drive past them. The radio is on, and there is a news bulletin: Marilyn Monroe has been found dead by her housekeeper in the bedroom of her Brentwood home. I remember those words. Marilyn Monroe. Dead. Housekeeper. Brentwood home. My mother starts to cry. Skip sits up and asks what happened.

  Then there are bright lights, what I now know were the high beams of another car, and they are moving toward us fast, in our lane, hurtling head-on toward us. There is the sound of metal upon metal, of glass breaking, of someone screaming. For an instant, I am airborne, flying above the way back, over the back seat, over the front seat, hurtling toward the night. Until my mother catches me like a football someone has tossed her way. My brother, older, heavier, has not been lifted into the air by the collision but, rather, has been thrown hard against the wall of the back seat, breaking several ribs and suffering a concussion. Surely an ambulance arrived and took Skip to the hospital after the car accident. My father probably went with him; my father was the one who swabbed our scrapes with Mercurochrome and put on our Band-Aids and brought us to the ER for stitches and casts. Yet I have no recollection of sirens or ambulances, of waiting—where? by the side of that dark road?—with my mother. All I remember is what came later, back at home: the long stretch of white bandages on Skip’s ribs, my mother’s terrified expression, my father lifting a glass of Jack Daniel’s in his shaking hands.

  We were instructed to keep my brother awake all night and check the size of his pupils every hour. Skip grew up without any lingering effects of his injuries. He became a chemical engineer, figuring out how to clean up toxic waste in places like Niagara Falls’ Love Canal. But years later, when my brother was thirty and drowned in the bathtub of his Pittsburgh home, my mother would recall that long-ago accident and wonder if it had something to do with whatever mysterious event led to his death. We spend so much of our grief looking for answers to explain what cannot be explained.

  MARILYN MONROE DIED on August 5, 1962. I wasn’t three; I was five. A five-year-old who could read. In Virginia at that time, a child had to turn six by September 1 in order to enter first grade. My birthday isn’t until December, so it was decided that I should go and live with my grandmother in Rhode Island, where a child could start first grade as long as she turned six by December 31. So was I even in the car in Virginia the night Marilyn Monroe died? Or was I in Rhode Island awaiting the first day of school? “Big Girls Don’t Cry” didn’t come out until November of that year, and “Rag Doll” came out in 1964. Whatever my mother was humming, it couldn’t have been either of those songs.

  But I want to keep my bowl full of these images, these soft, lovely memories. I want to keep the taste of that fried chicken on my tongue. Not just the fried chicken at that roadside picnic in the Blue Ridge Mountains but years of it: hot from the silver fryolator in a bright yellow bowl, cold in the backyard on a summer day, all you can eat at a chicken place in Indiana with all of my Indiana cousins and aunts and uncles. In my college years, when my friends and I drove to Florida every spring break, my mother fried up chicken for us to snack on during the long drive.

  But somehow years passed. All that other fancier, more complicated fried chicken came my way. Then last summer I found myself craving the simple fried chicken of my childhood. No. I found myself craving my father’s throaty laugh, the way he said roof like it rhymed with hoof, how being wrapped in his arms made everything okay. But he was gone almost twenty years, although the particular blue of his eyes had not faded for me. And my brother, dead at thirty, the science geek who had the first Betamax and CD player; what would he think of iPhones and Netflix and everything the world has invented without him? How I wanted to have a beer with both of them, ask their advice on the big life decisions I was facing. And then I craved that fried chicken.

  I was heading to a wedding in Michigan that August, and although it was not exactly on my route, I needed to detour to Greensburg, Indiana. I sent out a message to my Hood cousins: Coming through Greensburg. Want fried chicken. A flurry of possibilities dropped into my in-box, and finally they settled on the Brau House in Oldenburg. We filled a room there, and in no time platters of all-you-can-eat fried chicken covered the tables. My cousin Keith Hood took me back into the kitchen, where the owner told me how she made that perfect chicken: lots of salt, lots of pepper—more of both than you think you need—in flour. Fry until crispy. So simple, this recipe. There were mashed potatoes and corn too, but it was the fried chicken I’d come for and it was the fried chicken I ate, breast after crispy breast.

  Every bite brought me back in time to that rest stop somewhere in Virginia, at a wooden picnic table eating fried chicken made by my mother, with my older brother beside me and my father so young his tattoo is still vivid reds and blues. All of us so young, and happy, and full.

  INDIANA FRIED CHICKEN

  No offense to Bobby Flay, but he has a recipe for Hoosier fried chicken that is way too fancy and cluttered with buttermilk and eggs and garlic powder. Real Indiana fried chicken has exactly four ingredients: chicken, flour, salt, and pepper. There is no thyme or lemon or anything like that. I am delighted to learn that there is now actually a southeastern Indiana fried chicken tour, and if you happen to be in southeastern Indiana, I highly recommend it. Please stop by Greensburg, the Hood hometown, and take a picture standing in front of the courthouse,
where a tree grows out of the roof. You can buy a postcard of it too, and send it to me.

  INGREDIENTS

  As much chicken as you want

  Enough flour to coat all that chicken

  Lots of salt

  Lots of pepper

  Oil to fry the chicken in—enough to cover it

  A NOTE ON THE OIL: My father used only lard to fry his chicken, and I suggest you do the same. However, the fine people at the Brau House in Oldenburg, Indiana, told me they use canola oil, and their chicken was among the best I’ve ever had.

  Put all that flour in a bowl and mix in more salt and pepper than you think is prudent, then throw it all into a big zip-top bag.

  Get your oil hot enough for frying, about 350 degrees F.

  Add the chicken, piece by piece, into the flour, salt, and pepper in the zip-top bag and kind of shake it around. Remove each piece, shaking off the excess, and place on a plate until you’ve coated enough pieces to fit in the fryer without crowding it, which will lower the temperature.

  Put the chicken in the hot oil in batches, making sure the pieces don’t touch each other, and fry until golden brown, flipping each piece once the bottom looks crunchy. It should take about 10 minutes for good-sized chicken parts, 8 for smaller ones. If you’re a thermometer kind of cook, it should read about 160 degrees F when you insert it into the thickest part of the chicken.