thyme roast chicken: cooking between the sheets

Julia Child’s breasts where leaning on the speckled white linoleum table in lopsided fashion. It figures, I was in the presence of the icon of American cooking and all I could focus on where her breasts.”Dear, just a speckle of black pepper will give it the bite you need”, she volunteered with a warm smile.The room was small and musty. It was late at night and the light had a warm glow to it. I didn’t know the day or the year, or the five other people huddled around her for that matter. All I recognized was the table. It was the same one that graced my family’s ancient kitchen in Venezuela thirty years ago. The one with the cheap, dented chrome border. How Julia’s breasts ended up resting on it was beyond me, but I wasn’t about to question that now.Her masculine, oversized hands chopped away rhythmically at the Boston bibb lettuce, assaulting the leaves with a quick sliver, leaving them finished in customized 2-inch shreds without them even having a chance to notice. Almost as if the lettuce came that way. A child’s cry pierced through the warmth of the room instantly shaking us from the intimacy of these four walls of culinary opportunity. I grimaced and bit my lip, pissed off because the kid was mine. The cry grew louder and was accompanied by a pestering “mama, mama.” As much as I wanted to be with Julia, I knew I’d have to leave.”Excuse me, I’ll be right back,” I offered, feeling sorry for myself. The five strangers and Julia looked up momentarily and gave me a diluted, empathetic smile: each one more the merrier that they had no children to tend to at the moment. They sipped their wine. It was chilled. And good. I could just tell.I left the room and entered a world of darkness, void of details or occurrences, just emptiness and lost time. When I returned, the lettuce was already delicately resting inside the bright red porcelain bowl. Come to think of it, it was the same bowl my mother had used to plop on my sister and I for our monthly haircut. The chipped red bowl would lie inverted over our heads as the blunt scissors battled against our thick lustrous hair. Mom was perseverant and determined as she worked her way around the rusted red frame, leaving us looking like five and six-year old Ringo look-alikes.But now the bowl was brand new and held no remnants of our fashionable past, another detail I chose not to question. And as I admired its bright metamorphosis, the child began to cry again. This time the stares I received from those around me where not so patient. The kid was bothering all of us and I’d better fix it.”Right back,” I assured them, making a quick exit stage left towards my nondescript world of darkness that cut me off of all of Julia’s memorable food moments (was that an anecdote on her first sampling of fois gras I was missing?) I knew parenting would be difficult and thankless, but this was one of the most difficult and thankless days I’d experienced. As soon as the anonymous kid that was mine was silenced, I returned from my exile.
”Place them gentle like so”, Julia, gingerly spreading a dozen oysters that had been coated lightly in a fluffy buttermilk batter and flash fried in hot oil. As they fell on the lettuce they oozed ocean. “And now we pour the warm garlic-thyme vinaigrette”, she instructed, automatically producing it from behind her on the white counter. Bowls where passed around and as I lined up to receive my portion of goodness that damn kid started wailing full force. “Damn it I want my salad!” I demanded out loud, whilst those around me now shifted into complete aggravation and a lack of sympathy for my situation. If it boiled down to Julia’s salad and my child’s earache, the choice seemed obviously simple to me. Be that as it may, I was being watched, so I put down my bowl and headed out towards my destiny as all the ‘ooohs’ and ‘ahhhhs’ over the salad chimed in the background.When I returned I was disheveled, distraught, and disconnected. The room had changed even though it looked the same. The circle around Julia had closed a bit and I was no longer a part of it. The bowls and salad where gone and the closest I had come to sampling such a divine marriage of earth and ocean was left wafting in the air for my nose to be teased by. Julia had moved on to another story, a time when she and Jacques Pepin prepared a simple roast chicken dinner together. She was cradling a bumpy, raw chicken in her hands as she spoke, holding it upright, as if introducing it to its audience. (‘Fredericka, I would call it’, I thought to myself. My ritual of naming my dinners had been inspired by Julia’s very intimacy with her food (who can forget that early footage of a raw chicken escaping her grasp and falling to the floor while she giggled with delight?))After describing the suspiciously simple method of preparing the chicken, Julia miraculously produced the finished product from behind her again. And as she set the chicken down on the table for all those around her to enjoy, she did another wonderful thing, she paused, smiled, and waved those large and friendly hands of hers from side to side to signal that the circle be reopened to include me again. The people began to part like the Red Sea, and I was instantly embraced by Julia’s warm smile framed by a stunning roast chicken. At that moment there was no crying child, no darkness, no interruptions, just Julia, an unforgettable dish, and I. It was a magical moment that ended all too abruptly on a dark morning at 5:14am when my alarm clocked buzzed to attention, socking me out of my wonderfully delicious slumber with Julia Child.