by Ann Hood
There was the year the Romanian exchange student turned the oven off when the timer started. The year the kitchen caught on fire the Monday before Thanksgiving and we had to buy a new stove and get it delivered before Wednesday. The year Sam and his cousin painted the wall of our rented house; the year Annabelle and her friends emptied all of the clothes out of the closets. The year after Grace died, when I ran into the street screaming and pulling my hair, grief so enormous and consuming that I could not take all that food and all those people.
But always, always, the turkey stock the next day. The turkey pot pie. The soup. The sandwiches, hot and cold.
One year I had no rice or egg noodles, so I boiled tortellini in the stock and a new tradition was born: Tortellini en Brodo.
But I wanted to talk about chicken.
Two years ago, Annabelle and I left that house that had hosted so many Thanksgivings and moved into a loft in a renovated factory (where we had just as grand a Thanksgiving as we’d ever had, with just as many friends and family). Before I had unpacked all of our boxes, I made a simple dinner for us of a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store and green beans. Cleaning up, I looked at that carcass and had one thought: soup. Why it took me over two decades to realize that my chicken dinner could give me exactly what my Thanksgiving turkey had, I cannot say. But that night I found my orange Le Creuset Dutch oven, and the next morning I covered the carcass with water and simmered it all day. The aroma made my new place smell like home. That night, Annabelle and I feasted on Tortellini en Brodo in rich chicken stock.
My husband, Michael, who is full of good ideas, told me that there was no reason to wait until the next day to get that stock simmering—I could do it overnight by placing the carcass, covered in water, in a pot in a 180 degree oven. I added carrots, didn’t I? he asked me. And onion? I didn’t, but I do now.
Time passes and everything changes. Or not everything, I suppose, but most things. New rituals are born, even as we hold on to or adapt the old ones. One night a week, Annabelle and I have a chicken dinner. While we sleep, stock is made in the oven. The next night we slurp Tortellini en Brodo, leaving enough for her to have a bowl of it for breakfast and a thermos full for lunch at school the next day. This we will do, I suppose, until she grows up and leaves for college. Until then, I keep lemons on hand to make our chicken moist, and tortellini in the freezer for our soup. It’s true: chicken soup cures everything.
MY ROAST CHICKEN
I roast a chicken once a week, and with the stock I make from its bones, we have Tortellini en Brodo for dinner, breakfast, and a thermos full for Annabelle’s lunch. These are the simplest, most nourishing meals you can make, and if you cook nothing else at home, please at least roast a chicken, make stock, and have Tortellini en Brodo. You’re welcome.
Serves 4 to 8
INGREDIENTS
One 6-pound chicken
A bag of baby carrots, 1 chopped onion, fingerling potatoes (optional)
Salt and pepper
2 lemons, halved (or an apple or orange, halved)
1 bunch thyme or rosemary or both
Unpeeled head of garlic cut in half longways
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.
Remove the stuff inside the chicken and dry the chicken with paper towels.
If you are using the optional veggies, place them in a roasting pan and plop the chicken on top of them; if not, just plop the chicken in the pan.
Salt and pepper the chicken, inside and out.
Stick the lemon, herbs, and garlic up its butt.
Pour the melted butter over it.
Roast for 1½ hours or until the little red thing pops out.
MICHAEL’S OVERNIGHT CHICKEN STOCK
My husband invented this way of making stock, and even though I’m a bit biased, I think it’s brilliant. While you sleep, your chicken is making you a rich, delicious stock! What could be easier?
Makes enough stock to cook 1 pound of tortellini
INGREDIENTS
The carcass of your chicken, broken up so that you can easily cover all of it with water
2 leeks, cut in half
2 carrots, cut in half
Smash up the chicken carcass and put it in your Dutch oven with the leeks and the carrots.
Add enough water to cover everything by an inch.
Stick the pot in the oven, covered (otherwise it will boil), and set the oven to 180 degrees F.
Go to bed.
Wake up and you have chicken stock!
TORTELLINI EN BRODO
This soup takes about 7 minutes to make. Take that chicken stock you made while you were sleeping (or 4 quarts of store-bought stock), bring it to a boil, and add a pound of tortellini. Cook until the tortellini is al dente, about seven minutes. Serve with grated Parmesan. If you want to get fancy, add frozen peas and garnish with chopped flat-leaf parsley. Some people cook the tortellini separately so they will not absorb the chicken stock and swell and soften. Then they add them to the stock after they’re cooked. I am not one of those people.
Let Us Now Praise the English Muffin
My husband, Michael, knows how to cook. He trained at the Culinary Institute of America, and he writes famous cookbooks with famous chefs, and he writes his own cookbooks, too, and wins James Beard awards. (He has also written other things, wonderful nonfiction books and a glorious collection of three novellas. Have I mentioned I’m in love?) But there are two things he cannot change my mind about when it comes to food: the deliciousness of American cheese (oh, please, it is the best cheese for a grilled cheese sandwich, especially on Wonder bread and served with Campbell’s tomato soup, made with added milk instead of water and a dusting of celery salt—right now the man I love is cringing as he reads this over my shoulder) and the fact that Thomas’ English muffins are the superior—no, the only—English muffin. He prefers a different brand, one that is also delicious. But to me, Thomas’ and English muffin are synonymous.
I cannot say that I grew up on English muffins; we were not an English muffin kind of family. We sometimes ate Sunbeam bread, which we called either bond bread or American bread, because what we mostly ate was crusty Italian bread, which we dipped into spaghetti sauce for after-school snacks or stuffed with meatballs and gravy or sausage and peppers or stew (which was beef chuck cut into chunks and simmered with celery, potatoes, and carrots in tomato sauce; the first time I ate the other kind of beef stew I felt confused). Sometimes, at restaurants, when a waitress asks my mother what kind of bread she’d like with her meal, my mother says, “American bread.”
But back to English muffins.
In Victorian England, they were eaten by the downstairs servants. The family baker made English muffins from a combination of leftover bread and biscuit dough scraps and mashed potatoes fried on a hot griddle. (The oven as we know it did not yet exist.) But families upstairs were no fools. Once they tasted these muffins, they wanted them for themselves. The word “muffin,” by the way, is thought to derive from either the French moufflet, the term for a soft bread, or the Low German muffen, meaning “little cakes.” Before long, English muffin factories appeared, and muffin men, with wooden trays around their necks filled with muffins, walked the streets hawking these little bites of deliciousness, the inspiration for the traditional child’s song with the line “Do you know the muffin man?” Famously, in my family, my brother sang that song in his kindergarten play. In fancier homes and clubs, the muffins were split open, toasted, and served at teatime.
Some people confuse English muffins with crumpets, but the difference is clear: crumpets use baking powder to create the characteristic “holes” on their outside to trap butter and other toppings. An English muffin’s holes are on the inside. And it was an immigrant from Plymouth, England, named Samuel Bath Thomas who invented the English muffin I love so much. Thomas came to New York City looking for opportunity when he was twenty-one years old, and six years later, in 1880, he
opened his own bakery, at 163 Ninth Avenue in Chelsea. There, he perfected the muffins and precut them—what we call “fork-split” today—so people could pull them apart without crushing the soft dough. There were thousands of bakeries in New York City back then, but Thomas’s muffins appealed to hoteliers, who thought they were fancier than plain old toast. Soon, Thomas opened a second bakery, at 337 West Twentieth Street, in a building that is still known as “the Muffin Building.”
I don’t know when I first tasted an English muffin—at a breakfast place somewhere? Or maybe under the Canadian bacon and poached egg and hollandaise of an eggs Benedict? All I know is that I love the combination of soft and crunch, the nooks and crannies, the perfect size—smaller than toast but big enough to hold a sandwich of chopped avocado, bacon, and lettuce. I buy a six-pack of English muffins every week. When my kids were little, I made them a snack of an English muffin, spaghetti sauce, and melted mozzarella: English muffin pizzas. Even now, almost every day at around eleven a.m. I toast an English muffin, and while it’s toasting I ponder the endless ways I can eat it. Crunchy peanut butter, sliced banana, drizzled honey. Butter and good strawberry jam. English muffin, breakfast sausage patty, fried egg, melted American (sorry, my beloved!) cheese.
I have had sourdough made from old San Francisco starter and tart rye and bread studded with salty, expensive olives. I have even had arguably the most famous bread in the world, the Poilâne loaf, which is made in Paris from only four ingredients—sourdough, stone-ground wheat flour, water, and sea salt from Guérande—then baked in a wood-burning oven and stamped with a large fancy P. And although I sometimes dream of these breads, they do not give me what the English muffin does. I do not have to cross an ocean or a continent for it. Instead, I simply walk into my grocery store, and in no time I am standing in my kitchen beside my toaster, butter knife or jam jar or poached egg in hand, ready for lunch.
ITALIAN BEEF STEW
Here are two ways to use English muffins that I like to make in a pinch. Lightly toast two English muffins. Warm leftover red sauce (see “Gogo’s Sauce,” page 151) and top each half with it. Add shredded mozzarella and put the muffins in the microwave or under the broiler or in a warmed oven just long enough to melt the cheese. Sprinkle grated Parmesan on top and you’ve got an English muffin pizza.
For breakfast, lightly toast an English muffin. Cook two breakfast sausage patties according to the package’s directions. Poach two eggs by cracking them one by one into a bowl, then adding each into rapidly boiling water. Turn off the heat, cover the pan, and let it sit for four minutes. Remove the eggs with a slotted spoon. Put the cooked sausage on the toasted English muffin. Top each side with a poached egg. Drape a piece of American or Swiss cheese on top, and heat in the oven until the cheese melts. Better than an Egg McMuffin!
However, everybody who has read this essay, besides putting in a vote for their favorite brand of English muffin, wants to know how to make the Italian Beef Stew. So here it is:
Serves 6
INGREDIENTS
3 pounds top round beef, trimmed and cut into 2-inch chunks
Salt and pepper to taste
1 onion, chopped
6 potatoes cut into chunks roughly the size of the meat
4 carrots, chopped
1 celery stalk, chopped
One 28-ounce can tomato sauce
Vegetable oil
Coat a Dutch oven with oil and turn the heat to medium high.
Generously salt and pepper both sides of the meat.
Brown the meat in the oil over medium-high heat.
Add the veggies and stir until fork tender but not soft.
Add the tomato sauce and enough water to cover the meat and veggies, if necessary. (A tip: Use the empty unwashed can for water. That way you’ll get whatever’s clinging inside.)
Cover and simmer for about one hour, or until the meat is very tender.
Let it rest, even overnight, before reheating and serving with crusty Italian bread.
NOTE: This stew is not thick like an Irish beef stew. However, if you want the broth a little thicker, make a slurry by putting a couple of tablespoons of flour or cornstarch into a bowl and mixing in about ½ cup of the hot broth until it combines. (If it’s too thick, just add a little more broth.) Then add it to the stew, stirring to thicken.
Comfort Food II
Here is, as E. E. Cummings wrote, the deepest secret nobody knows, the root of the root and the bud of the bud: I am sad. A lot. There are times when I can’t catch my breath because I am so sad. Sometimes I wake at three or four in the morning feeling like I am having a heart attack. But I realize soon enough that what is gripping me is not a literal seizing of my heart. It is, instead, a metaphorical one. My broken heart is seizing up again, remembering, aching, sobbing.
What I want to say, to believe, is that it gets better. And in some ways it does. God forgive me, days and days pass in which I don’t think about Grace. How this can be so, I don’t know. When she first died, not even a second passed without my thinking of her. Or of the absence of her. During those first weeks, someone told me that she’d lost a daughter long ago. “But recently,” she said, “I was in Borders buying books and I was writing a check and when I filled in the date, I paused. It was the day my daughter had died, years ago.” I remember thinking what a relief that would be. I remember thinking how terrible that would be.
I don’t think I ever will forget that day. April 18, 2002. In fact, I remember it kinesthetically before my brain remembers it.
This year, in mid-March, I was overwhelmed by the desire to knit. Not just to knit, but to knit something hard. I knit all the time, mostly cotton dishrags in happy colors. Also lots of hats—lately in a soft alpaca I discovered at Yarnia in Nacogdoches, Texas. And fingerless mitts to keep my sweetheart’s hands warm. But come March, these projects were not enough. I needed something hard. So I signed up for a tutorial on knitting arm warmers with a technique called helical stripes, which I’d never even heard of before, on four double-pointed needles, which I hadn’t knit with since the year Grace died and I developed an obsession with knitting socks on them. I watched a lot of YouTube tutorials: how to cast on with those needles, how to join your knitting in the round, and, of course, how to knit helical stripes. I dropped stitches, one night two-thirds of them, or forty-eight. My knitting had holes and ladders (don’t ask). I knit and I unknit, sitting on my sofa and flying in airplanes. My friend Mary, who had also embarked on this helical-stripe journey, gave up in frustration—she who knits sweaters without patterns. But I, lazy dishrag knitter, persisted. I loved how impossible that arm warmer was, how I had to keep focused and reread directions. How I had to keep my head down. How those stripes mostly were perfect, chasing each other around my tiny needles.
“I just need to knit for a while,” I told my sweetheart.
“I’ll knit a few rows, then start supper,” I told my daughter.
Deadlines called to me. Novels waited to be read. I think I’ll just knit, I said to myself.
I made a thumb gusset. A cuff. I cast off. One arm warmer was finished, albeit imperfectly. This is the point in many a knitter’s life when joy turns to disappointment: we must start over again and knit the second one.
But not me. On April 1, a snowstorm hit New England. There was nothing to do except knit. I cast on those seventy-two stitches and with glee began all over again.
It wasn’t until a few days later that my mind caught up with the rest of me. April 18 loomed. I was knitting to keep grief at bay, as I’d done that first terrible year and for so many years that followed. But, of course, knitting only softens the sadness. Nothing takes it away.
That sadness doesn’t just arrive in April. It still hits me when I see Seckel pears in the grocery store. Little blond girls in glasses. Hear the Beatles singing “Eight Days a Week.” The sharp stab of a memory rises to the surface out of nowhere.
Oh, Grace!
Like knitting, there is food that offers com
fort. Emily Post wrote in 1922 that we should feed the grief-stricken simple broth. Me, I make a doctored ramen. I poach an egg in it and add butter and American cheese. I put it in a big orange bowl and eat it, every drop.
When, this April, I put my knitting down long enough to get up to make that soup that comforts me and found I was, foolishly, out of ramen, I turned to my second-best comfort food: grilled cheese. (Perhaps the key to soothing my aching heart is American cheese?) My usual simple version—white bread buttered on the outside with that cheese in the middle—didn’t feel like enough for how much comfort I needed that day. So I tried a recipe of Ruth Reichl’s that included mayonnaise and cheese on the outside and butter and cheese on the inside. Yes. That did the trick. I ate that crunchy, gooey sandwich, the plate in my lap as I sat on the sofa. When I finished, I picked up those double-pointed needles, and I carefully knit helical stripes. Outside, the sky was silvery gray. Sometimes, even in April, it feels like spring will never come.
Riffs on Comfort Food
You have probably noticed that this essay is called “Comfort Food II,” which raises a question: Where is “Comfort Food I”? The answer is that it is an essay I wrote not long after Grace died; it appeared in the literary journal Alimentum, as well as in my memoir Comfort: A Journey Through Grief. That essay talks about taking comfort in eating Grace’s favorite dinner: sliced cucumbers and pasta with butter and Parmesan. I eat this meal every year on September 24, her birthday. I would love it if you did, too, and thought about Grace as you ate.