Roast Chicken & Perfume

crude elemental emotions

Hello hello,

Spring is nudging forward with not enough haste in my opinion. It is cloudy and drizzly AGAIN, and there is only so much misty mac-wearing British-Isles fantasy one can muster before they just want the sun. I have, for the first time since moving here taken an interest in the garden, and am planting some fun varietals of vegetables that I can’t really get here. The quality of organic produce available is good but it doesn’t really veer away from the basics (an orange carrot for example, a standard french breakfast or globe radish). Nothing excites me more than a slightly exotic set of ingredients so I am contenting myself planting things like albino beets, watermelon radishes, and pink celery.

Dinner Again went well. I am relieved it is over though because I find myself with a Monday at last to relax into. I do not intend to cook anything major today, and will instead probably do some more work in the garden and read my book. I am revisiting Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, which I loved in high school and still love now. In fact, he’s grown on me. I never realized he had such a good sense of humor. In my mind he’s always existed as an alcoholic baby-man, which remains true, but he has me giggling none-the-less with swift lyrical character sketches that manage to simultaneously assassinate and ingratiate. Which is of course, the silly paradox we often feel about the people we love best. That they are in turns, depending on our mood, fools or geniuses.

Dani’s birthday is Thursday, so we are having a party Wednesday and then shutting up the restaurant Thursday to recover and continue celebrating. We have gotten a half of a 1 year old lamb from our friend who is a farmer, and are going to roast it over a fire in the garden. We have gotten many magnums of wine and I’m going to make a bunch of salads, and rice, and a giant carrot cake decked out in cream cheese frosting and primulas and forget-me-nots.

Somebody asked me if I would elaborate on my roast chicken method in my next newsletter. So I shall, but I will wait until the end of this letter, because I know for a fact that one of my most cherished readers and pals cares nothing for recipe chatter and it will make it easier for her to skip that part if it is well segregated at the end.

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In the meantime I wanted to talk about another love of mine, perfume. I am desperate to learn how to make it but can’t quite figure out who I trust to teach me via their little lessons or kits because so much perfume out there is so very bad. I am considering investing in one of the 4160 Tuesdays lesson plans (the small perfumer I mentioned visiting a few months back in London).

In any case, perfume is an incredible conduit of human life and experience. The smell of people (and everything else) is something I pay a great deal of attention to. It is the most visceral of the senses, in the true definition of that word, meaning: felt in or as if in the internal organs of the body : deep : not intellectual : instinctive, unreasoning : dealing with crude or elemental emotions.

When I was in high school I only ever wore one perfume, because I had this idea about womanhood as a kind of static mystery. Unchanging, recognizable by a whiff, singularly defined but elusive. It was full of youthful flourishes like grapefruit skins and vanilla, which is deeply not my style now, but does still seem to me appropriate for a 15 year old. I wanted to always smell the same so I could be lusted over via a signature. Enigmatic but deeply familiar. Like a letter arriving in the post smelling of the women back home. That kind of romance.

The perfume changed over the years but my loyalty to one scent at any given time did not. I continued to want to invoke a clear and recognizable stirring of the senses that was consistently and recognizably me. In hindsight however, it was also a little fear-based, a little magical-thinking-esque. For if I yearned for someone but felt insecure I would not dare, for example, change my shampoo. They had, on various occasions commented favorably on the smell of my hair, and thus, rocking the boat was out of the question.

When I was 21 or 22 I wore a perfume called Smoke and Violets. I loved it, oft describing it as smelling like “a rich girl that ran away from home”. And it did, it had all that slightly bruised morning-after rompy campfire stamina of youth. Waxy lipstick smells and wet crushed underboot flower smells, and good dry tobacco and burning bonfire. Like hitching a ride in a hay wagon, falling asleep on the journey, waking up under the moonlight, stopping to rest and light a fire and stay warm. Shrouded in finery growing a bit more tattered but also even more melded to your body. The creasing of dusty mauve velvet, the hay in the hair, the smeared coral mouth.

Eventually, because of everything that occurred during the time in my life that I wore it, I could not bear it anymore. I could no longer stand the smell.

Still, every couple of years I go to the shop that sells it and abuse myself a little by taking a whiff. It is intolerable because of what it invokes. The person who I was when I wore that perfume pains me in hindsight but I also experience a lurid curiosity, an almost maternal horror and by extension, care, that makes me visit her.

Nowadays, I am for the first time in my life, not loyal to just one scent and instead treat perfume like I treat everything else. That is, that every smell has a thematic and narrative purpose, depending on what I am doing, where I am, who and what I want to feel like on a given day. The funny thing is, in the end, no matter what perfume you wear, it still very much becomes you. So for the most part people continue to associate your salad of smells with you, even if one layer of them changes around a bit. I no longer fear being unloved via a shampoo change.

I’ve got one perfume, Hinoki (Japanese Cypress) based that makes me feel like a hot boy who wears baggy expensive architectural clothing. I like the catachresis of my gibsony-overflow with this spare modern man in beautiful canvas trousers. Another is rose based, which renders me dewy and desirable in a kind of, new-school-teacher moves to village and lives alone in a pretty cottage, way. She is beautiful, and the environment she concocts within her little walls is the imagined salvation of much of the town, barring some busybodies who think her inappropriate and slightly subversive because of her pedal pushers and lack of husband.

Chanel’s Sycamore is alllll money. Despite being from their “natural” line it is the only one of all of my perfumes that has notes I would call ubiquitously department store. Described as evoking “Mademoiselle's childhood amongst the centuries-old volcanoes in Auvergne.” It instead for me evokes the escalators of Neiman Marcus with their fluttering silver butterflies beside. To be a teenager in a department store and dream of another life. I exist suddenly in the clean fabulous slightly sterile world of nothing ever being laborious or worn-out. Shoes which never look used up, fabric which is always crisply new. Environments whisked into shape by hands besides my own.

For nighttime and sex appeal there is a scent like cigars and sweat and sugar. It’s very human, in a vice-like sense. A best case scenario scent. Like how you think adulthood will be before all the excitement you can get into renders anyone crazy or depressed or alcoholic. It’s a party. A big dusky one in a house that isn’t yours with so many lovely alcoves and people, that intimate sub-parties are possible. Every new person is mysterious and beautiful and you are wearing a backless white linen dress.

Finally, the one I wear most often, smells like my grandmother. Or, as close as I can get. You have to understand that while comments about perfumes leaning “grandma” are often pronounced derisively, my grandmother smells better than anything in the world. This is perhaps the point of origin for my scent obsession. Everything she touches, even if its been sent hundreds of miles in the post, is clung to with a scent that is delicious and wholly of her. She brands everything she comes near to with an olfactory monogram and I sniff it hungrily and hungrily, hoping it will stay. It’s a sandalwood base note, low and comforting and sweet. But not like sugar, like earth-sap. It’s a smell that means clean house, but not in a suburban way. This is ancient. Like real beeswax coating things to preserve them, and true sea sponges scrubbing tiles, and groves of fruit trees in the wind, and caves of clean jars of food, and sparkling racks of thick hand-blown glasses. The promise of stiff line-dried bedding and feather pillows scented with spike lavender (not regular lavender!) before bed. It’s blowy-clean, cold water in metal thermos clean, outdoors clean. It has managed to transcend and keep at bay primitive human fears like vermin, illness, and rot. It’s the reassurance that somebody knows what they are doing. We will survive and sweep the porch, and be healthy, and have dinner, and sleep another night and wake another day. The sheets will be washed, the vegetables fresh, the hair braided, the windows open. Everything will be ok, so long as we do our small pleasurable chores and carry on.

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Alright, so the chicken! There is a childhood anecdote often repeated in my family concerning my love of rotisserie chicken. Apparently when I was about 5, upon returning from the grocery store, I bounded through the front door of my grandparent’s house, shivering with excitement, trilling in a high pitched little girl way “IIIIIIIIII LLLLLLOOOOOVE CHICKKKKKKEN”. This does not strike me as particularly funny but my family continues to chuckle about it and bring it up and mimic this high-pitched utterance whenever there is chicken to be had.

For ten years I was vegetarian, and did not touch the stuff, but upon my return to the world of flesh I have once again resumed my love of chicken. My last meal vote, besides a bag of Newman’s Own Pretzels, is either Roast Chicken or Scrambled Eggs, so I have chickens to thank on two counts.

When I started cooking meat, basically for the first time, because I had become a vegetarian at 12, I found it a bit scary. I think many people do. I was however, determined to get it down, and began to butter and brine with gusto trying out many many recipes for birds. You will be either disappointed or perhaps relieved to know that after all that, my go-to method is incredibly simple. While I do not deny the virtues of all these different methodologies for fussing and think they can indeed procure good results, I do not, in the end feel they are really necessary. Do not listen to all the fear mongering about dry tasteless chicken, it is mostly unfounded when you are cooking a whole skin-on bird. Why would you ever buy a boneless skinless breast? This is not 1986.

My advice first and foremost is to get your hands on the most quality whole chicken you can find. Not to big, not too small, pasture raised, organic if possible, untreated with antibiotics etc. A healthy plump little creature will produce good results without much work, so this is the place to begin. Sadly lots of chickens are packaged up without their giblets which is a shame. We are being robbed of wonderful nutrients we ought to be entitled to when purchasing the whole animal. If the giblets are intact, lucky you! Get a grip and stick your hand inside the cavity and remove them, they are often already packaged up in a little baggy, so this isn’t exactly a wilderness skill. Set them aside in the fridge, and save them, because you will put them in your broth later.

Pre-heat your oven to about 375 °F (190-200°C). Salt the cavity of your bird generously, rub it all around. Then make some shallow incisions on the skin all over just deep enough to tear slightly and lift the skin and rub salt all around the outside flesh. Attempt to reinstate the skin to cover the tear, it will not be perfect and will split a bit while roasting but thats ok. Next, stuff the bird as much as you can. I use anything I have around. Onions halved with the skin left on, whole heads of garlic with the tops sliced open so the cloves can come out, apples halved, pears halved, lemons halved. Whatever you have on hand that makes sense flavor-wise with the meal you are preparing, stuff it quite full. Throw in some herbs too, if you want. This is nice but also not necessary. The point is just that it is well stuffed, this will help it cook evenly and insure you have a juicy chicken with a crispy exterior. I tend to cook my chicken in a cast iron pan, but any oven safe dish of appropriate size (meaning it fits) will do. Place it breast down, with the legs sitting up in back, so it looks like a classic cartoon of a roast chicken.

Put it in the oven, and cook for 1.5 hours. If at about this point or sooner the legs in back have started to turn just tipping over deep golden into dark, turn the oven down to about 325°F (150-160°C ), and let it keep going for another 15 minutes to a half hour. We want the whole thing sizzling and deep red-gold. You know your oven best, they all have different temperaments. Some run cooler, some hotter, be mindful of your machine’s eccentricities. Once this occurs, take the chicken out of the oven and let it rest for 10-20 mins and then serve immediately. It will be perfectly crispy skinned but moist and flavorful on the inside.

For an easy but satisfying meal put some big leaves of freshly washed lettuce on the table, along with raw slivers of onion, good slices of cheddar, mayonnaise, mustard, little gherkins and whatever other accoutrement strikes your fancy. If it’s Summer, tomatoes of course. And if you have friends who will feel cheated without bread, put some slices of that on the table too. Otherwise all the bits wrapped up in just the big crisp lettuce leaves spread with condiments, is divine. Save whatever bones you eat from, don’t just toss them away.

Later on, strip whatever meat is left (if any) and put it in a container to refrigerate and have later. Put your carcass in a big pot along with the leftover leg bones and things your guests have nibbled (plus the giblets if you have them) and fill to cover with water. Throw in whatever other debris you have on hand (onion ends, celery nubs, carrot tops, the hard stems of greens or herbs, parmesan rinds. A chili or two could be nice too). I tend to throw in too, whatever I used to stuff the chicken with (though the garlic is sometimes already eaten), except for in the case of whole lemons. I take the lemons out a discard them before putting the bones in for broth. To me the length of time the lemon will be stewed renders it too intense and slightly pledge-like. It’s up to you though, you might feel differently. Put the pot on an extremely low heat (I use a cast iron flame tamer often known as a stovetop heat diffuser to minimize the impact of the fire) and cook for at least 12 hours. We don’t want to bring it to a boil, because that boils off the collagen which is very good for you. However if it does boil, don’t fret, it’s fine and still very nutritious. (Side note: boiling is also what makes broth cloudy, so if you want a very clear broth, slow and steady). I tend to taste at that point, after twelve hours, and see if I want to add any salt (remember the carcass was already salted), add salt and pepper to taste if it needs it. Finally, let it cool, strain out debris, and find yourself with a wonderful broth to be sipped, turned into soup, used to cook grains and beans instead of water/or as a secondary cook/reduction, thrown over sautéed vegetables to deglaze the pan, or frozen for later use (just remember to leave an inch or so of space at the top of your containers bc liquid expands when frozen). Also, if you refrigerate it it will likely form a jelly cap from all the fat and collagen. Don’t be alarmed, this is a very good sign! It will reincorporate back into the liquid once heated and is very good for you.

Voilà, the miracle of a chicken.

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I hope this finds you all well! I must get out of bed now and confront the world. It is 1pm already. Sending love! xxx