The Food Season I: Meals and Cooking On The Run Up To Thanksgiving

            My father’s mother rolled out homemade pasta.  She pounded the dough on the counter until it formed homogenized balls of fine flour, egg, water, salt and other dustings of I don’t know what.  She then rolled the mud-white balls into circle shaped parchments, sliced the flattened dough into strips with a small knife and settled the strips to dry all around the kitchen, on countertops, chair backs and tables.  My Great-Grandmother – Ma – helped and the two women worked together, mostly in silence, sometimes talking quietly.  The conversations were about this niece, that brother, some uncle or a cousin in Maine.  All family.

During the cooking my Grandfather sat in the kitchen, drinking coffee or beer, smoking cigarettes, not quite listening or watching, pretending to read the Providence Journal or Evening Bulletin.  I sat with him.  I was little.  I could sit for a lifetime in that kitchen.

In that sanctuary as the homemades dried the two women cooked other foods, all ancestrally Italian – this was still an Italian kitchen.  In it they made this or that:  red sauce with rolled beef; stuffed artichokes, squid, or shells; roasted chickens; breaded chicken cutlets; brown meatballs; fire-roasted peppers; big antipastos; escarole soup. 

I watched it all.  Uncles and aunts stopped by after dinner for coffee and pie.  Each Thanksgiving, falling asleep, full as a python, watching football in their living room.  Sitting around the Christmas table after the meal.  The red Christmas table cloth, speckled with gold thread, its surface dusted with crumbs, weighed down by pie plates, coffee cups, ashtrays.  The adults talking and smoking and drinking coffee.  Me sitting there eating my pie, watching. 

From today through the Tuesday before Thanksgiving I am going to post bits of an essay I wrote about remembered meals, eating with friends, the importance of food.  And I'll try to offer up a recipe although nothing so precise it will be helpful.  Here is the first one:

Chicken Cutlets

2 lbs. chicken breasts

2 cups or more dry bread crumbs

4 eggs

black pepper

good parmigiana cheese

salt

olive oil

garlic

making the batter

beat two eggs and add salt and pepper to taste.

on a plate spread half of the bread crumbs and mix in some grated cheese.

preparing and cooking the chicken

Start a quarter of an inch of virgin olive oil in a cast iron skillet and add some slices of garlic.

Fillet the chicken breasts quite thin and then beat the breasts with the side of a knife or with a kitchen mallet.

Dip the cutlets into the beaten egg mixture, dredge the cutlet through the bread crumb and cheese mix and dip the cutlet again in the egg batter.  You will need to pause half way through cooking to replenish both the egg batter and the bread crumb/cheese coating.

Fry each cutlet until the batter is brown and the chicken breast is white but still tender.

Eat it all yourself or it is a meal for four.  Terrific with a pasta with red sauce.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2012 David Rocchio