CHICKEN AND LARD
SERVES 4 TO 6
Fran’s grandmother—or step-grandmother, really—was Aunt Tina. Fran’s grandfather Francis, who was Portuguese, married her after he divorced his first wife, a Sicilian woman, which was pretty much unheard of back then. He ended up marrying Tina, a Portuguese woman twenty-odd years younger than him. Well, Aunt Tina was one of the best cooks that anybody knew. Even Fran’s mom, Joy, loved her cookin’—especially because it was so different from all the Italian food she grew up eating—and chicken and lard was one of her favorite dishes. She loved eatin’ the tender meat from the underside of the chicken, and she really loved the wings. It used to make Aunt Tina so mad because Grandpa Francis—or “Chico,” as she called him—also liked the wings, so she ended up having to buy extra wings for when we were comin’ over.
Aunt Tina ended up teaching Joy how to make this dish and told her the three secrets: You gotta use lard; you gotta cook the chicken low and slow; and you gotta use a can of warm beer.
3 large white onions, cut into wedges
4 russet potatoes, peeled and cut lengthwise into wedges
4 sweet potatoes, peeled and cut lengthwise into wedges
¼ pound lard (look in the dairy aisle, near the butter)
4 chicken breasts
4 chicken legs
4 chicken thighs
4 chicken wings
1 cup olive oil
½ cup salt
½ cup black pepper
½ cup granulated garlic
½ can Budweiser beer, warm
2 tablespoons chopped fresh Italian parsley
Preheat the oven to 300°F.
In a roasting pan, make a layer of onions and potatoes. Add the lard.
Coat the chicken pieces in the olive oil, then season them generously with the salt, pepper, and garlic. Put the chicken in the roasting pan on top of the vegetables and lard.
Cover the pan with foil and bake for 2 ½ hours. Raise the oven temperature to 350°F, remove the foil, add the beer, and cook for 1 ½ hours, uncovered, so the chicken skin gets crispy and the juices and beer reduce. Sprinkle with parsley and serve.
PORK CUTLETS WITH VINEGAR PEPPERS
SERVES 6
If there was a special on pork chops, this is what was for dinner. Although pork chops are pretty cheap anyway (and if you have to feed a bunch of hungry kids, it’s a whole lot cheaper than steak). All our moms needed to do was fry ’em up and make a quick sauce with the peppers, which we always had in the pantry because they last forever and have great flavor. Sometimes they’d serve ’em more American-style, with applesauce or duck sauce, but this was by far the best.
4 large eggs
1 cup whole milk
½ cup Dry Bread Crumbs (here)
6 (1-inch-thick) boneless pork chops, butterflied (ask your butcher to do this)
2 cups plus 3 tablespoons olive oil
4 garlic cloves, chopped
1 cup pickled pepper brine
1 cup marsala wine
4 teaspoons all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons butter
3 pinches of salt
1 pinch of black pepper
1 pinch of red pepper flakes
½ cup hot peperoncini peppers
In a large baking dish or bowl, beat together the eggs and milk. Fill another large bowl with the bread crumbs.
Submerge each pork cutlet in the egg mixture, then immediately transfer to the bread crumbs. Make sure the chops are completely coated with the crumbs.
In large frying pan, heat 2 cups of the olive oil over low heat until shimmering. Fry the pork chops in the hot oil until golden brown, 5 to 6 minutes. If you can’t fit all the cutlets in the pan at once, fry them in batches. Transfer the finished cutlets to a paper towel to cool.
In a medium saucepan, heat the remaining 3 tablespoons of olive oil over medium heat. Add the garlic and cook until brown. Add the brine and marsala and cook, stirring rapidly, for 5 minutes. Add the flour, butter, salt, black pepper, and red pepper flakes and continue stirring until the sauce has thickened, about 2 minutes. Add in the peperoncini peppers.
Pour the sauce over the cutlets and serve.
ITALIAN ROAST BEEF OVER WONDER BREAD
SERVES 6
This is something our grandmother made a lot, and it was pretty basic roast beef. Except for one thing: She used our grandfather’s drill to make holes so she could stuff it. She’d make them about the size of a dime and then use her fingers to shove in some garlic, parsley, and grated cheese. We guess you could just use a knife, but it doesn’t seem like nearly as much fun. Fran’s mom would sometimes use an electric knife to do it, but we wouldn’t recommend it—it makes the meat taste like a hairdryer or something.
You can serve the roast beef on its own, or you can do it like Grandma did and pile slices on Wonder Bread and top the whole thing with gravy.
4 pounds top round beef
6 tablespoons chopped garlic
1 bunch fresh flat-leaf parsley, leaves and stems chopped
6 tablespoons grated pecorino
½ cup olive oil
Salt and black pepper
2 white onions, sliced
4 beef bouillon cubes
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon salted butter
Preheat the oven to 375°F.
With a power drill, carve a dime-size hole in the center of the beef all the way through the meat. If using a knife, insert the knife so it goes all the way through the meat, then do it again with the knife at a 90-degree angle to the first cut, so that the two slices make an X. Stuff the garlic, parsley, and cheese into the meat from both sides. Liberally coat the outside of the beef with olive oil and season with salt and pepper.
Spread the onions to cover the bottom of a medium baking pan. Place the beef on top and bake for 30 minutes. Reduce the oven temperature to 250°F and bake for 15 minutes more. Once the inside temperature of the beef registers 135°F on a meat thermometer, it’s ready.
While the roast beef is cooking, make the gravy. In a medium saucepot, bring 3 cups of water to a boil. Stir in the bouillon cubes, stirring until the bouillon has completely dissolved. Add the flour and butter to the pot and whisk until smooth. Cook until the mixture has reduced to a thick, gravy-like consistency, 2 to 3 minutes. Pull it off the heat and serve over the roast beef with the onions from the bottom of the pan.
