Family Nourishment

For being the owner of a restaurant, in those days at least, I don’t remember my grandmother ever making anything too fancy when we came to visit and stayed at her house. One, two, three weeks at a time; the only intervals I was ever able to know her, growing up eight hours away and usually seeing her only when we came to her house twice a year. Her house is old, so very, visibly old, what people not familiar with it must imagine every house in New England is like. And yet the kitchen, with its red plastic counter and aging electric stove, was so very old in a different way, seemingly renovated in the 1950’s with the markings of mid-century design to prove it. Renovated long after the house was built and long before it was my grandmother’s; renovated when even she was still a child.

She was probably tired after running the front of the Thomaston Cafe all day, and roast chicken is easy, such a simple thing to cook, as I have learned myself now that I am an adult and have begun cooking on my own more often. I know now what it truly is to appreciate simple dishes. Take a whole chicken, put it in a roasting pan. Rub salt and pepper around and under the skin of this once living being. Cut potatoes and carrots to leave in the pan around it. Thyme and oregano and whatever other neutral tasting herbs go there, too. Probably some broth around it, all of it, in the pan for the flavor and moisture. Leave it in the oven, below the aging electric stove.

As simple as simple dishes can come; the roasted flesh of a winged creature. Probably cooked and eaten in this spot since before it was my grandmother’s, since before the kitchen was renovated, since before it was a house and since before it was New England. But it was my turn, then, to nurture my body with this divine simplicity; to bask in the warmth of something one may not always have, but could always count on.