Grannie's Chicken

TWO CHICKENS: GRANDMA’S & LIKE A FROG

Grandma’s Creamed Like a Turtle

.When filming him for my PBS series America’s Best Chefs in Alabama, with the great chef Frank Stitt at his Highlands Grill, we talked about the women in his family who cooked, which turned into talk of American Grandmas. About the richness of having a family structure that insisted on family dinners, dining, working together in a vegetable garden, and the extraordinarily rich emotional content that it gives our lives.

Much has been made over the last 100 years about the cooking of women, particularly when it means remembering grandmas. The French were very proud of it, and La Mere Blanche practically a national heroine. But America is right alongside in its enthusiasm, the proof being the huge and wonderful heritage we have of the Women's League and church society cookbooks and recipes. Everything from Swamp Cooking to White Trash, to The Ladies of Virginia.

A friend of mine sent me a proposal for a cookbook on his grandmother's cooking and, more importantly, her highly structured way of life the memories of her values sustain him to this day. I was riveted on the recipe for a cure of pneumonia, especially now with the reappearance of fluish birds:

Take a ball of cotton wool, stick it on the end of a fork, stick it in turpentine, and take a large whiff.

That would certainly knock something out of the trees.

Nineteenth-century America and its books on household management by all the Junior and Church Leagues were full of recipes for cures. No wonder since they had no antibiotics or anesthetics other than whisky. Some of the cures are for old furniture. Mixing turpentine with linseed oil was one, as long as you weren't sniffing it instead.

My grandmother never touched a furniture polishing rag (that was for the Japanese housekeeper), but she did dally in the kitchen. In her own way her values were as strictly believed in and adhered to as were my friend's. The daily rituals that kept the qualities of everyday life together were rudimentary and clear: never slacken or drift.

Every morning she, not the cook, would prepare my grandfather's breakfast, even when it took her an hour longer than anyone else because things had to be done the (her) right way.

Five choices of dry cereal were laid out on baking sheets and toasted, then allowed to come to room temperature before my grandfather came to the table. Every day a choice of three sugars would have to be put in freshly cleaned and wiped bowls. Washing eggs before boiling them was left up to the cook, but under the raptor eyes of my grandmother. She hated to be called grand anything unless it meant her furniture, because she thought it meant ‘old.’

Old but not ageing was her recipe for Poached Hen Terrapin that she had taken from an old recipe from her Philadelphia days. It is one of many for American creamed chicken.

How to Cream a Chicken like a Terrapin (Turtle):

Of particular note here is the 35-minute cooking of the roux (flour and butter) thickened broth. The French call it a “velouté,” and velvety it should be. The long cooking and skimming, and not the many recipes that call for 10 minutes of simmering, transforms the raw flour into silky texture.

Photo Courtesy of Le Journal des Femmes

“Take a 4–5-pound capon or boiling hen, poached it in aromatic broth until tender. Cut up the white and dark meat. Put 4 tablespoons each of butter and flour in a saucepan, melt and stir a few minutes (but no browning). Pour in 1 cup of the poaching broth, bring to the boil while stirring all the time, and reduce the heat to a simmer. Cook for 35 minutes, skimming all the time. The mixture should be quite thick, so do not let it burn. Add 2 cups of cream and cook 5 minutes. Season highly with pepper and salt. Add the chicken and heat. Just before serving add 2 tablespoons of sherry. That's the terrapin part. And finely chopped hard-boiled egg. If you were a Philadelphia grandma, you would add a braised and crumbled veal sweetbread.”

As long as you don't serve it on rusks (try instead hot buttered white real bread toast), this creamed chicken is delicious. And then you could comment like the introduction to the brilliant Beowulf by Seamus Heaney:

“And now this is 'an inheritance' –

Upright, rudimentary, unshiftably planked

In the long ago, yet willable forward

Again and again and again.”

You know Beowulf – the song about "encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath."

Like 2025.

Whip up some grandma's creamed chicken, open some old Krug, and renew the upright.

Again.

Like a Frog

Fur is one of my favorite words, especially when it is fur in French. As in au fur et a mesure. Or, as you see the gradual progression of estimable, enjoyable, and measured fashions of the times in which piled up generations of fine things manage to create a whole which is far more of a whole than any that is deliberately composed.

A great chef or cook lets the ingredients set the stage and the pace.

The food revolution that started in California in the seventies was not conscious of itself at the time. But what has happened since? American restaurant food has become more sophisticated, neater and more symmetrical. It has become more deliberate and intentional, and less haphazard. We calmed down from having gone first wild and then headstrong. We lost something; we gained something. We lost the extravagance of youth. We gained the sobriety of middle age. To paraphrase words from Vita Sackville-West of the change from the everyday sobriety and unplanned architecture in Elizabethan England to the consciously organized one of the 17^th century.

All this passed through my mind after a bit too much local Umbrian red following a wonderful dinner at a restaurant just down the hill from Bramante’s church in Todi. The waiter was curious if I really liked his family’s recipe for the dish of lamb guts that I had just devoured, about the Umbrian version of the Yucatecan buche, or pig stomach filled with blood and its guts. He said that they did not want to scare off the tourists, but that by honoring the spirit of that very old dish, his mother had created something entirely new. In answer to my question of whether his co-chef mother and grandmother would come out to explain ancient values preserved, his answer was very similar to the description of the great Belgian landscape architect Jacques Wirz.

“He’s not a good quote person. He’s more interested in the eternal verities.”

At least that’s what I think he said in Umbrian Italian.

Fine.

But what does that mean for my cooking? I wondered in the strong sunlight of a morning in the Umbrian valley. It was the table’s discussion of eternal flavors and satisfactions, specifically chicken, that made me think of this one for whenever it is grilling season again.

Get yourself a really, really good chicken – biologica, agricoltura, natural, organic, biodinamica, free-range, or whatever you want to call it. You are going to cut out its backbone and then, with a good whack, flatten it out so that it becomes crapaudine, like a frog or, if you are English, spatchcock.

Photo Courtesy of Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez

Poussin chickens (1 to 1 ½ pounds) are particularly wonderful cooked this way, one per person. You will need a sauté pan ½-inch larger all around than the flattened chicken, and a flat cover, that can be weighted down, ½-inch smaller than the diameter of the pan. The gap is important to let out the steam so that the final result of a moist and tender chicken, breast meat and leg meat both properly cooked, and very crisp skin.

3-pound Frying chicken

¼ cup Olive oil

4 sprigs Fresh rosemary

Ripe, juicy lemons, cut in wedges, seeds removed

Sea salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Hold the chicken on end, and very carefully, with all fingers out of the way, cut down one side of the backbone, and then turning the chicken around, cut the other side. Save the backbone for stock. If you have kitchen scissors or shears the job is a lot safer than with a knife. Then put the chicken cut side down on the table and flatten it out a bit. Give it a good whack with the palm of your hand to flatten it completely and break the breastbone. Tuck the wing tips under.

Rub it all over with half the olive oil, salt, and pepper. Let sit for 1 hour at room temperature.

Put the rest of the olive oil in a sauté pan, and heat moderately. Put 2 sprigs of the rosemary in the center of the pan and the chicken in skin side up on top of the rosemary. Cover. Put a large can of juice or a brick on top of the cover. Cook over low heat for 20 minutes, take out the chicken and rosemary out, put the remaining sprigs in with the chicken on top, this time skin side down. Cover again and cook until the juices run clear, about another 20 minutes. Remove the cover for the last 10 minutes.

Pour the fat out of the pan and add a little water or stock. Over high heat scrape all the bits of browned chicken juices into the liquid, simmer 1 minute, and then soak slightly stale ‘rustic’ bread, that has been rubbed with garlic, in the juices.

Serve the bread and the lemons with the chicken.

An accompanying watercress or rocket/arugula salad dressed with walnut oil and champagne vinegar would be nice.

MORE CHICKEN

Kiev

Photo Courtesy of Eat the Bite

First encountered at my white Russian uncle’s lunch table when I was 15. He and my fabulous Cordon-Bleu- trained aunt served this chicken breast that was pounded out, rolled around a lot of cold butter, coated with egg and fresh white breadcrumbs (no crusts – too strong a flavor), and fried.

With it we had kasha cooked and then baked with more butter instead of the usual plain rice. To make up for the lack of that, my aunt paired the kasha with wild rice prepared the same way. Boiled, massaged with melted butter, and baked. Several times fluffed with a fork while baking.

Heaven.

Yakitori Wings & Cold Sake

The first six months of my job as executive chef of Chez Panisse, I was earning $500 a month. No funds for eating out, but there was on place I could afford. At the counter of a Japanese restaurant in San Francisco’s North Beach. As soon as I would enter, the chef would start the chicken wings.

And it was he who introduced me to cold sake.

Several of those and a dozen wings and I was ready to head back to the 18-hour days of the kitchen.

Photo Courtesy of Foodies.com

Rotisserie & A Teenage Trouble Maker

In my Santa Fe Bar & Grill days after Chez Panisse a writer friend from Gourmet magazine showed up a week early at my Bernal Heights house in San Francisco. She wanted lunch. Typical of an 80-hour a week chef there was nothing in the fridge but vodka, white wine, and vanilla ice cream.

I ran down the hill and bought a couple of rotisserie chickens. Cut them up, put the pieces on a platter, went out to the front porch, picked nasturtiums and scattered the flowers across the chicken pieces. That took 30 minutes and the friend thought I was a genius.

Which I was to her after she had drunk half a bottle of vodka.

Now I buy Costco rotisserie chicken for our new teenage trouble maker.

But I get the wings.

Baltimore Fried

I was visiting the Baltimore house of my girl friend’s parents. The family owned The Washington Post and Newsweek so they could afford a fabulous cook. She was from the South so perfect fried chicken was first nature to her.

Perfectly crisp on the outside and perfectly tender and juicy inside.

Much to her shock a white person showed up in the kitchen after the lunch as I came in. Begging for the secret. Probably generally known now, but then not to any Northerner.

Keep a lid on the frying pan for the first 2/3 of the cooking, and remove it (no trapped moisture) for the reminder so that the skin will become very crisp.

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