On the Roasting of Chicken · 3 September 2002
You will have acquired one already; let it be plump and spry, and three pounds give or take. Set the chicken on a plate and move around it, bending at the waist and coming in close to get a good look: you want to admire and get to know your bird. Jab it in the thigh with your index finger. Get the oven going, nice and hot.
Stuff the chicken with a good walnut of unsalted butter, into which you have mashed ground white pepper, some salt and a bit of chopped tarragon (a few leaves will do). If you have only dried tarragon, leave it out altogether. Should the bird not be trussed, do so. If you can’t be bothered, tie the damn legs together and let’s get on with it.
Smear another walnut of butter over the entire chicken, and place it breast-up in a roasting pan. Into the oven for five minutes, during which time you will melt still more butter in a small saucepan with a generous dollop of olive oil, and dig out the basting brush which, due to its porosity and increasingly strange smell, you regard with some suspicion but always end up using nonetheless.
Remove the pan from the oven and baste the chicken with melted butter and oil. This activity will only be improved by placing a hand on your hip and parrying with and lunging at the chicken with the brush (calling out en garde! touché!) or, alternately, imagining yourself in a beret and painter’s smock as you make little dabs with the brush and purse your lips (note that both these are best avoided if there is a risk someone will enter the kitchen unannounced).
Back in the oven for ten minutes, during which time you will peel and slice an onion and a couple carrots, and then perhaps enjoy a contemplative cigarette or cool beverage.
Ratchet the oven temperature down to medium-hot, remove the pan and baste. Carefully turn the bird on its side (use a couple wooden spoons to prevent piercing the skin), distribute the sliced vegetables around it, and return it to the oven.
Now bugger off elsewhere – socialize, converse – drifting back now and again to baste with the fat that will by now be gathering in the pan. After half an hour, turn the chicken onto its other side, where it will stay, occasionally basted, for another thirty minutes. (Note that the enterprise would not be complete without burning your hand on the oven rack or roasting pan at least once, that you may blaspheme and call out in anger and those nearby will know how very hard you are working at dinner.)
For its final cooking, turn the bastard breast-up. Stay close to the oven, basting regularly; one might pull up a chair so this final hovering period will pass in comfort. If any of the skin is allowed to dry out, you will be disappointed to such a degree you may punt the chicken out the kitchen door and spend the evening moodily drinking and yelling at the TV.
Two ways of knowing when the chicken is done: a sputtering of juices inside the oven usually means it’s about there, but the sure-fire test is simply to lift the bird with a large wooden spoon inserted into the cavity and let its juices run out; if what comes out is clear and yellow, then it is done.
Now. You know enough not to haul out the carving knife right away; the chicken needs to rest at room temperature for 10–15 minutes before being served. While this takes place, discard the vegetables from the roasting pan and place it on a hot stove, add some water or stock mixed with a bit of white flour, and whisk briskly (!) until the pan is deglazed and you have something that resembles gravy.
Best served with mashed potatoes that resemble, in my friend Ingram’s immortal description, ‘butter and cream held together with ... a little bit of potato’.
* * *