52 OCTOBER 2017
when I figured out how to make this on
my own after a few tries. She said that she
would be there, and she hugged me good-
bye and asked an assistant to bring me a
cappuccino. “It’s been a long day so far,”
she said. It was 2 p.m.en days later I would stand
over another dead, naked
chicken, not quite remember-
ing how we did it all: How we
wiped sweat from our brows with our
hands full of chicken, how the chicken
was made into its most manifest chickeni-
ness, which way you were supposed to
tie it, how I had a goal and I achieved it in
the space of two hours. I would drop the
chicken by accident and google whether
or not I could still eat it, then realize
my hands were full of chicken afterlife
when I typed and so googled how to clean
a keyboard. I would burn the parsnip,
unable to find the sweetness. But then 24
days later, I would do this again, this time
just with chicken parts and some carrots,
and I was able to remember how the car-
rots were supposed to turn out: bright
orange, brighter than they had been raw,
but soft without being mushy.
On that day, my kids sat down at the
table. I served them the food. They ate a
couple of bites of the carrots. My older
son said they were too hard. The younger
one said he didn’t like the “burny” parts.
Then they ate the chicken. They put it in
the sauce and mindlessly put it in their
mouths. They said nothing qualitative
about it. I asked what they thought. They
didn’t answer me because they were fight-
ing about Minecraft, how important it is
to procure iron before nightfall. The older
one ate a breast; the younger one had a
drumstick. They left the table to play bas-
ketball. Mom: I’m sorry.
But at the Spotted Pig that afternoon,
that hadn’t happened yet. No, that after-
noon, having said goodbye to April, I sat
at the counter, drinking that cappuccino.
Her assistants came in to clean up our
mess and set up for whatever was going to
happen next. As they did, they took giant
hunks of chicken with their hands and ate
them, and they popped carrots and fen-
nel into their mouths. The food made its
way into their bodies, where it became a
part of them forever.Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for
The New York Times and its Sunday magazine.
This is her first article for Bon Appétit.went into the pan too, but the fennel was
an entirely different animal and had to go
in later. The first time I bought a parsnip
it was because it looked like something
that belonged in soup. Yes, now I remem-
bered. When I was young and lived out of
my house for the first time, I used to try to
make vegetable soup. I tried to make soup
two or three times a week in my dorm.
Sometimes it was okay, and sometimes it
wasn’t. That wasn’t so bad. Eventually we
pulled the chickens out briefly so we
could give them a vegetablectomy and
add those maximally chicken-y vegeta-
bles to the others in the pan.
The chickens went back into the oven,
and every few minutes, April would open
the door and pull them out and turn
them. “Look at that skin,” she said. It was
browning in some parts. It smelledincredible. This chicken, just a chicken
made for demonstrative purposes. It
wouldn’t be served at a restaurant. I
would take some home to my husband
and children. Then it would be gone. And
still, look how much she cared. Look how
much pride she took in her work. There
was no name on it and it wouldn’t last
forever, but right then it was the most
important food. I was so moved by that.
I was so moved at the care and devotion
for the food of just one meal.
When we were done, we ate some of it.
We couldn’t believe how good it was.
There is nothing like watching a chef eat
her own food. I told her that and she said,
“No, this is your food. You made it.” I told
her I would invite her over to my houseApril would say, “See how chicken-y?”
And it was. But more than that, there was
her pride for being able to make it so.
I asked her what size the vegetables
should be cut into. “Well, medium,” she
said. If they’re too big they won’t cook
well, and you don’t want to start with
“pissy little bits of veg.”
But how big is medium, I wanted to
know. Was there a way to quantify it? Can
I take a picture? I needed to have a skill
when this was done. Maybe they were the
size of my two thumbs put together.
Would that be a good way to remember?
How much time, and what do you do if
this goes wrong, and how did she know
that she could use Madeira instead of
Marsala and olive oil instead of butter?
I was hot and overwhelmed. When I
was young I could bear not knowing
things. Now I realized that something as
basic as roast chicken was going to be my
undoing. She answered all of my ques-
tions gamely, but in the end, she said this:
“Yes, but you know how it goes with
practice. The practice is necessary.” She
was being gentle. “You should feel com-
fortable making mistakes because that’s
how you learn.” She was saying that I
shouldn’t be afraid to start without know-
ing everything. There was no way to do
this without screwing it up first. Look at
her, all these years, and look at the burn
marks on her arms. Look at the chickens
she sometimes still has to throw away.
We continued to cut fennel in silence.
Did she understand how endless this was?
Did she understand how often children,
particularly seven- and nine-year-old
boys, needed to eat? If I somehow proved
competent at cooking, did she realize
how much I’d be on the hook for it? Chil-
dren, people, need to eat every few hours,
the most extraordinary inefficiency that
the human body has. This would become
my life. I could bear some of that. What I
couldn’t bear was that time plus the mis-
take time. The chickens in the garbage.
The time with nothing to show for it.
I didn’t feel like I had time to make mis-
takes; I was too old. I now had a keen
sense of just how short life is. April went
to cooking school on a lark when she was
- She had time to figure it out. She had
had time to make mistakes before she
knew that time wasn’t endless. I would
just be starting.
We roasted more vegetables that
weren’t inside the chicken until they had
a char on one side that extracted some
sugar and made them sweet. The parsnips
THE FEED
t
PHOTOGRAPH: © EVE ARNOLD/MAGNUM PHOTOS.FOR RESTAURANT DETAILS, SEE SOURCEBOOK.“I would drop
the chicken by
accident and
google whether
or not I could
still eat it, then
realize my hands
were full of
chicken afterlife
when I typed
and so googled
how to cleana keyboard.”