Chicken with bacon, olives, and tomato sauce

Another blogger would be posting all kinds of holiday recipes now, specifically Chanukah recipes, as the first night is but four days away, and I am a fully-fledged member of the tribe.

But…

I’m going to assume you neither need nor want another recipe for challah with cilantro or latkes with cranberries. I’m going to crawl even further out on a limb and admit I am not fond of updated Ashkenazi recipes. My Lithuanian forebears did not have access to rosewater, figs, or cumin seeds, all ingredients I’ve seen suggested recently in Chanukah recipes for Ashkenazi foods (broadly, Ashkenazi Jews hail from Eastern Europe.) These are all lovely ingredients. None are faintly Ashkenazic.The food of my people is bland, heavy, filling. You leave the table knowing you’ve eaten. Further, you feel that way for hours. This is not, in context, a bad thing.

Ah, context, bugbear of English Ph.D programs everywhere. Ashkenazi food in context, briefly: It is helpful to partake of food prepared by an excellent cook, like my deceased grandmother. It is helpful if the weather outside hovers around 0 degrees Fahrenheit. It is extremely helpful if every dish save dessert has been prepared using mountains of chicken fat.

Context, as participants in English Ph.D programs can attest, is difficult. That’s why there are no latke recipes here. Let’s talk about chicken instead. In fact, really treyfe (nonkosher) chicken, with a little bacon tossed in.

This beautiful recipe is adapted from Paula Wolfert’s Mediterranean Cooking. It’s a classic Paula, exemplifying what she calls “the big taste”. Here, that means the best parts of Southwestern French cuisine–that treyfe bacon, garlic, tomatoes, olives, olive oil, chicken stock–get folded into one big dish.

Wolfert’s recipes have a reputation for fussiness. The duck confit recipe in The Cooking Of Southwest France is three pages long. The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen’s Night And Day Slow-Roasted Pork Shoulder takes 12 hours to cook. Many of Wolfert’s stews take two or three days to prepare. Yet the work itself, while time-consuming, is seldom difficult. My favorite Wolfert recipes tackle tough, inexpensive cuts of meat, cooking them until they’re silky and sumptuous. As for time, those cooks unable or unwilling to spread a recipe over three days need not: a stew may be cooked in an afternoon.

Whatever path one takes when approaching a Paula Wolfert recipe, the experience of cooking is on a par with consuming the inevitably wonderful result. To cook under Wolfert’s tutelage, her book open beside you, is to absorb more than you realize. Apprentice yourself to Wolfert’s books and learn all the ways a little pork can flavor a dish, everything about confit, the most economical ways with duck. How to coax flavor from uninspiring bits. How to make cassoulet. How to choose a bottle of Armagnac. What to do on a cold night with a package of chicken thighs.