Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [57]
tossed a salad. We never ate before eight, by which time Isabel was cantankerous and I was a little drunk.
I used to eye the rotisserie chickens, those warm, whiskey-brown birds under the heat lamp near the cash register at the supermarket. They smelled so seductive I wondered how a person could get one home without stopping by the side of the road to eat it with her fingers. My mother, by then a divorcée who was feeding only her footloose self, was always buying rotisserie chickens. I looked down on her for it. Rotisserie chickens were what you ate when you gave up. No, I was going to turn myself into a human pretzel to give my family a proper Norman Rockwell roast bird dinner at least once a week.
But why?
One day not long ago, I bought both a raw chicken and a rotisserie chicken. Every rotisserie chicken was marked 28 ounces and, at checkout, the $3.99-per-pound rotisserie chicken appeared to cost more per pound than the raw chicken. But when we got it home it weighed in at 31 ounces, which brought the price down to more like $3.60 per pound. Meanwhile, the $1.99-per-pound raw chicken weighed 5 pounds at checkout. But after I removed the giblets and roasted it for an hour, it weighed just 3½ pounds, raising the actual price to $2.80 per pound. After accounting for the ingredients—a lemon, a half stick of butter, some herbs, and salt, plus fuel to heat the oven—the cost of the chicken we ate was more like $3.40 per pound. So: $3.60 a pound for a ready-to-eat rotisserie chicken, $3.40 per pound for a chicken cooked from scratch.
The little rotisserie chicken did not look particularly regal, squatting in the middle of the platter, bathed only in the paltry liquids that had collected in the bottom of the heatproof bag. By contrast, the home-roasted chicken was sheathed in golden pepper-flecked skin and reclined in a moat of opulent juice.
I carved the chickens and divided up the portions. We tasted. The breast meat on the home-roasted chicken was bright white and firm; the thigh meat was taupe and also somewhat firm. Except for the crispy seasoned skin, the meat was bland until you sluiced over it the lemony juice, which masked all of its shortcomings.
On the other hand, there were almost no juices to pour over the rotisserie chicken. It didn’t need any. The tender meat was fully impregnated with flavor, almost as if it had been braised. Everyone in the family agreed that the rotisserie chicken made better eating. Yet everyone also agreed that the homemade roasted chicken was “better.”
Isabel said, “It seems wrong to just bring home a cooked chicken.”
I said, “But, why? Why is it more wrong to bring home a cooked chicken than to bring home a box of crackers?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But it just is.”
It just is. Commentators always mention burgers as the quintessential modern American meal, but I think that sells us short. The roasted chicken is more emblematic of what we’re striving for day to day. We want the Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving illustration: a smiling family, a well-laid table, a roast bird. Symbols are important.
Still, if I could go back, I would tell my younger self with the job and the little kid to buy the rotisserie chicken. Norman Rockwell probably never roasted a chicken in his life.
These days, I have more time to roast chickens—but why would I roast a chicken when I have the time to make cannelloni from scratch? Sometimes I roast a chicken anyway. I think the key is to salt the bird the night before, which both improves the flavor of the bird and lets you get the filthy part—touching raw chicken—out of the way ahead of time.
Make it or buy it? Both.
Hassle: Definitely
Cost comparison: Actual cost of home-cooked roasted chicken, starting from scratch: $3.40 per pound. Actual cost of a rotisserie chicken: $3.60 per pound.
1 tablespoon kosher salt
2 teaspoons freshly ground pepper
1 chicken, 3 to 4 pounds
4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter, softened