Learn how to prepare my mother’s roast chicken – 05/09/2023 – Recipes by Marcão

I hardly try to reproduce the foods that my mother made. Not because she didn’t like them. Dona Ana was a good cook. Not exceptional, but she had some successful dishes at home.

The feijoada, with a vinegary onion sauce she created herself, I think. Batalhau, cod with little fish, full of tomato, onion and, of course, potato. The tomato sauce, lightly burnt on the bottom of the pan, which she learned from my grandmother.

I avoid imitating mother’s food because I know it’s impossible to compete with affective memory. But I will make an exception. As Mother’s Day falls on Sundays, inevitably, Sunday food will be made.

Nothing sounds more like a Sunday to me than roast chicken and pasta. It is a combination that the Italians abhor —for them, pasta as an accompaniment to meat is heresy—, but which has fallen in love with descendants born in Brazil.

Dona Ana, granddaughter of Venetians and Neapolitans, served pasta and chicken on every other Sunday. When she roasted the chicken (it was always easier to buy ready-made), she had a not very common preparation.

I don’t know if the mother wrote down the recipe in a notebook. I have no way of asking her, sunk in senile dementia. I know she had orange juice and bay leaves.

I’ve always preferred chicken thighs. As a teenager, I ate four or more at a single lunch. As the chicken is a bipedal animal, it was not worth roasting the whole chicken. The mother already bought the individual legs at Bete, a reliable Sunday market on the Rua Inglês de Souza.

This is the first time I’ve tried to emulate my mother’s roast chicken. Without a recipe from her, I invented mine from memories.

The result brought me both good and bad news. The good news is that the chicken turned out great, juicy and well seasoned with orange and bay leaf.

The bad news: it’s not my mom’s chicken or my memory of it. All right, I already entered the battle defeated, knowing that it would be impossible to match the affective memory.

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