A number of years ago I found myself sitting on the back steps of a centuries-old church in Aix-en-Provence watching dozens of workers setting up the daily farmers’ market. It was shortly after dawn, and I was enduring the usual jet lag, but with pleasure.
There is nothing like the sight of tons of food to divert one from banal complaints. Plus, there was the astounding experience of witnessing a young woman as she deftly climbed into the church’s organ loft and began to play Bach at a volume that caused the stone beneath me to hum.
But of particular interest, despite the early hour, was an immense rotisserie loaded with rows of chickens and ducks. Juices from the fowl were gently dripping downward, bathing the lower tiers and the capacious bottom bin filled with sausages as well as roughly chopped leeks, fennel, and peppers. Even with the resonant and somewhat mathematical beauty of Bach surrounding me, I felt the call of the wild. Naturally, I bought a chicken—thinking that duck might be a little heavy for breakfast—and some of everything else. Growing up in the Midwest, I was taught by wise souls that breakfast lays the foundation for the day, and mine, made complete by a bottle of Domaine Tempier Bandol, left me surging with the kind of energy you don’t get from the French custom of a baguette and coffee.
The primal urge to cook and consume meat on the bone has been with us since we figured out how to put food to flame two million years ago. Of course, a roast chicken is, in a sense, utterly ordinary, but then, if we’re not careful, so are most of our everyday lives—and also what we tend to eat. But there is something about the presence of bones and the flavor they add that’s not to be found in the relatively sterile and ubiquitous skinless, boneless chicken breast. With proper cooking, even a plain hen can rise to the level of what theologians like to call “the divine ordinary.” The same may be said of porterhouses, all manner of ribs, whole fish, and just about anything else cooked on the bone. You absolutely must pick up the bone that remains and chew on it as your ancient forefathers did around the fire while listening to the trumpeting of mastodons in the distance.
Perhaps my fascination with this topic is partly genetic, as my father regularly masterminded the roasting of a couple of hundred chickens for church picnics. (A good oven is only an enclosed version of an open fire. Either will work admirably.) It may also be due in part to the technique’s nearly inexhaustible applications, commonplace and otherwise. Beyond the everyday hen—something so simple as not to require a recipe—I have roasted half a prime Hereford steer (with help), whole lambs pierced with sixty cloves of garlic, small wild piglets of twenty pounds and domestic porkers of 100, a beaver (unsuccessfully), hundreds of grouse and woodcock, an immense pig’s head from a recipe I seem to recall reading in one of the early editions of Joy of Cooking, and untold whitefish and lake trout in a basket over an oak fire at our cabin. And more, to be sure.
Only a few weeks ago we grilled a cabrito, a young goat, over a very hot fire. Both goat and lamb find true companionship in a basting of olive oil, garlic, and thyme. The ten-year-old daughter of a friend chewed on a bone until it was white, which shows that all of us—even elegant little girls—can be primitive sometimes.