Eating - Jason Epstein [8]
Add butter as needed. Sauté carrots and celery with the onions and mushrooms until soft and slightly colored, and set aside with the pearl onions and chicken.
Meanwhile, in a separate pot, bring four cups of strong, defatted homemade chicken broth to a boil, or reduce six cups of organic stock from a carton, enriched with chicken parts and defatted, to four cups. Clean the cocotte once more, and in it melt six tablespoons of butter. Whisk in three tablespoons or so of Wondra instant-blending flour or arrowroot, and cook, stirring, until just turning light brown, then whisk in the boiling stock, smoothing out the lumps, and one and a half cups of half and half, three or four tablespoons to taste of dry sherry, chopped leaves from a stem of fresh rosemary, and a tablespoon each of fragrant fresh thyme and Italian parsley. Add sea salt and fresh-ground pepper to taste and the juice of two lemons. Bring to a slow boil, reduce, and simmer until the sauce is thick enough to coat a spoon. If it’s too thick, thin it with more stock and/or half and half. Cover the pot with parchment or plastic wrap until ready to serve. If using fresh peas, cook them first over a low flame in a small pot with a few lettuce leaves and a little butter, but do not add water. When they begin to soften, remove and discard the lettuce leaves and add the peas to the reserved chicken and vegetables. Otherwise, defrost and add a box of frozen peas. When ready to serve, remove the parchment or plastic wrap. Stir in the chicken and vegetables, and heat gently over moderate heat, being careful not to overcook the chicken or burn the sauce. When the chicken is just cooked through and firm to the touch, taste the sauce, correct the sherry, lemon juice, salt, and pepper, and turn off the flame. Return the pastry to a moderate oven until warm. Then cut it with a sharp knife into as many wedges as there are guests. Use the scraps for seconds. Serve the pie, which will serve six for dinner or eight for lunch, sprinkled with flat parsley, coarsely chopped, in large, warm pasta bowls, with the puff-pastry wedge pointed down into the sauce. I myself plate the pie with the puff-pastry wedges already in place, but others might bring the whole pie to table with the wedges on a separate platter.
When I was asked by a magazine editor some years ago to describe my kitchen, it struck me for the first time that I had unconsciously re-created my grandmother’s wainscoted and varnished walls and ceilings, big black stove, cherrywood countertops, yellow pine floors, willow-ware platters, and bright copper pots. This cannot have been accidental, for I have two kitchens—one in Manhattan, where I have a shelf for preserves, and the other in Sag Harbor on Long Island, and each is a collage of the other. In the Sag Harbor kitchen, my favorite perch is a blue armchair. My chicken pot pie is homage to my indomitable grandmother.
I have never taken much stock in psychoanalysis, with its contribution to narcissism and its emphasis on repressed memory. I believe that the important roots of human suffering are to be found within the shared failings of the species itself—in the human condition—modified by personal genetic determinants, rather than in the accidental encounters of one’s childhood. Yet my preference for varnished wainscoting, for the robin’s-egg-blue kitchen armchair where I like to read, and my choice of the kitchen as a place in which not only to cook and eat but also to read, write, and contemplate the world, as well as my reflexive association