Everything is going to be OK, because I am going to roast a chicken. The only way to properly roast it is on a cast-iron skillet that has preheated with the oven, so the chicken’s undercarriage cooks up nice and hot, and renders a robust amount of shmaltz. Chicken shmaltz is flavor, and also love and sustenance. These are the wonderful things that a good bird can provide, and I put my back into it.
In my house this process is sometimes referred to as Drama Chicken. This is because we once lived in an apartment whose oven was terrible. It would often take almost 2 hours to roast a chicken at 375’, which is a kind of insanity that I did not handle well. I would stand in the kitchen and yell COOK FASTER!, cursing in ways that only low-blood sugar can produce. Sometimes the bird would come out almost cindered, and other times weirdly limp, as if it had somehow been steamed. My disappointment would often trigger tears, and I would sob about it to my husband, apologizing for the tragedy that I was serving us for dinner.
In my defense, I did not take up cooking until later in life. For the first part of adulthood I was a single, self-employed musician and music teacher, and my budget mainly afforded canned and frozen food, which I heated up on the stove top or in a toaster oven. Having been raised by hippies I knew how to make a good salad, but anyone can throw a bunch of vegetables in a bowl and glop dressing on them. I did teach myself to bake pies so that I could bring something memorable to social events. But working with recipes, layering flavors, and constructing a full meal from scratch was not my thing.
When I look back on that time in my life, I notice another drama that was playing out in my kitchen. I never used an apron. I didn’t own a single one. Aprons made me think of women from the past, 1950s housewives “slaving over a hot stove” every night to cook meals for their entire household. I didn’t want a household and I didn’t want to slave, and the apron seemed like a symbol of those things. I was afraid if I put on an apron I might lose myself.
Yet the sad fact is that I was slaving over my laundry, because a great many of my clothes had food stains. I don’t even want to tell you about the vintage blue satin dress that got slopped down the front with oily lentil soup, or the coral cashmere sweater, an expensive gift from a friend’s mother, that got scorched with hot grease from the tofu burger I was heating up in a pan (it burned right through to my skin!). Whenever I was working in the kitchen food landed all over me. I switched from white tee shirts to black to try and camouflage the mess. It didn’t work.
Then a friend asked me to come over and teach her to bake a pie, and the minute I walked in her door she handed me an thick cotton apron. I strapped it on reluctantly, but after the pies were done and the kitchen cleaned, I removed the apron and was gobsmacked by my clean clothes. The shock on my face must have made an impression on my friend, because she insisted that I keep the apron.
I wore that thing to shreds and even bought a new one, but I still feel weird when I wear it. For me, aprons map back to the massive amount of unpaid labor that women do, all the cooking, cleaning, child care, and household management. These things have actual monetary value, as I recently reminded a friend who dropped everything to fly home and clean her elderly father’s entire house. He told her she should pay him a fee to stay with him on the trip, even as she cleaned, shopped for groceries and cooked extravagant meals for him. If he hadn’t had his own daughter’s help and hired a team to do those things, the cost would have been exorbitant. Her work was completely taken for granted, as is the case for women doing this work all over the world.
Cooking in an apron makes me feel invisible, and I resent that feeling. My body expresses this resentment by being clumsy and slapdash (you should see how many of my plates are chipped!), but this is low-key drama that I’m OK with. I want to honor my full, visible self, and let it guide me as much as possible. Nothing tastes better than that.
I love the descriptions here, especially the drama chicken process. You made me laugh. I can count on my two hands the number of whole chickens I have cooked. But now I am craving a roast chicken!
I am an apron convert. I get what you are saying about it evoking all the unpaid labor women have historically done, but I think laundry is my least favorite of ALL of the domestic tasks, so making more trouble for me by staining my clothes just feels like a terrible self-own. One thing that made my apron-ing dramatically better was getting a cross back version - I absolutely loathe things hanging from my neck (halter tops can rot in hell!), so when I traded in my neck-hanging apron for the cross-back kind - such a relief! Also getting one with deep pockets is great, too.