Celebrate Spring With an Upscale Smothered-Chicken Dinner

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/magazine/spring-smothered-chicken-dinner.html

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Chefs are not generally the best source for recipes. They don’t use them the way we do at home. Often they don’t use recipes at all. Many of them cook instinctively, the way artists work. They do not measure ingredients before cooking. They navigate by taste and smell. They respond to the sound of fat sizzling against a piece of fish, or the sight of a shallot turning golden in the heat. When they’re happy with the food, they jot down a few notes, then cook the dish again and again until it can be made by rote. The people who work for them watch and listen and smell and taste until they can do the same — professional cooking is about apprenticeship and technique. Most line cooks don’t receive formal recipes from which to cook. They get battlefield instruction for soldiers new to the front, sauce-stained cards scribbled with notes: sweat in rondeau, drop; roast, save fond; arroser fish; crash jus with stock. Civilians don’t cook that way.

So when I got it into my head to cook a version of the pan-roasted chicken with morels and a Madeira-laced cream sauce that the chef Angie Mar has on her spring menu at the Beatrice Inn in Manhattan — it’s an upscale smothered-chicken dinner, basically — I didn’t ask for the recipe. I asked if I could watch her cook.

Mar was game. “I never really write recipes anyway,” she said. “It’s hard.” (Lately, to get better at it, she said, she has been weighing all her ingredients before cooking, and then weighing what’s left when she’s done, to arrive at exact measurements if not the time spent preparing them.) She invited me to the restaurant on a Monday, when it was closed, the cooks off for the day. There were a couple of plumbers wedged under the bar up front, fixing a pipe. Mar was wearing black, and among her necklaces there was a golden one with a rectangular pendant. It read: “In Pursuit of Magic.” I thought that was a good sign.

In the restaurant’s cramped and tiny kitchen, she assembled ingredients: pint deli containers of savory and tarragon and parsley, of Oregon morels, Cognac and Madeira, crème fraîche, chicken stock, cream. There was a slim, beautiful heritage-breed chicken resting on a platter. “This is going to be luxurious,” she said.

It was heaven, and instructive, to watch Mar work that morning: to see how she cut up the chicken into bone-in thighs and legs, wings and boneless breasts; how she browned them slowly, piece by piece in a low Dutch oven, so that the skin became golden and tight; how she tossed the morels in the fat of the chicken and flamed them with the Cognac; and how she simmered them with the chicken and a little stock so that, amazingly, both legs and breasts were moist and perfect. She worked slowly and methodically, perhaps because I was perched at her shoulder stopwatching and taking notes, but also as a home cook might, step by step. She was finished in under an hour.

Mar talked as she worked, noting how the cream was thickening in the sauce, how she was going to add the Madeira in parts, so she could taste her way to the flavor she wanted. At one point I saw her slip a knob of butter into the cream on the stove, to follow the wine. She saw me notice and laughed. “For gloss,” she said. More followed with the crème fraîche, so that the sauce fairly glistened, like silk cloaking the back of a spoon.

“To me, this dish is like a celebration of the very start of spring,” Mar said. She grew up in Seattle and looks forward to the yearly arrival of Washington State morels with joy. She loves how they sop up the nutty caramel flavor of the Madeira in the cream, how well they play alongside the fresh, crisp softness of the chicken. The dish tastes of France and the Pacific Northwest and maybe a little bit of Canada too, with the savory.

It tastes of New York, in other words, where extravagance for dinner is often just a matter of shopping well and following a recipe closely. If you have a recipe, that is. I took my notes home and wrote one up. It worked like an incantation, magic every time.

Recipe: Pan-Roasted Chicken in Cream Sauce