Pan-Roasted Chicken with Rosemary, Garlic and White Wine
The recipe is classic comfort food, Marcella style. It calls for a whole chicken cut into quarters, browned in a combination of oil and butter and then slow cooked on the stove top with the wine, garlic and rosemary.
Here is the chicken browning in the pan:
I really didn’t expect to develop this much flavor with the minimal ingredients just sitting in the pan with the chicken. The garlic and rosemary were left in the liquid, whole. But the result was a rich comforting dish like you would get from a braise.
For sure, I will make this again in the winter. If you live somewhere that has the seasons already changing, go for it soon.
If you like the sound of this, then be sure to try a similar dish with cherry tomatoes and olives from Marcella Cucina.
Deborah responds: Hey, David. Glad to see you back! Cherry tomatoes and olives, yum.
Pan-roasting is the traditional Italian way of cooking meat because very few cooks in the land had ovens. I much prefer to cook over the stove rather than popping something into the oven and closing the door on it. It is so much more involving, it is cooking filled with sounds, smells, and movement,cooking that takes place entirely before your eyes. It’s the ancestral cooking of the Italian home. When we needed to bake something like lasagne in an oven, we would send it to the local bread baker who, for a fee, put it in his oven for us. And that too is the reason why you see so many dishes in the classic Italian repertoire where the chicken has been cut up into pieces. You can pan-roast squab or quail, but not very easily a whole chicken.
yes, it is my favourite hazan dish so far, although the chicken with red cabbage, which one of you will cook soon no doubt, is sublime with potato mash. that is certainly my girlfriend’s favourite dish. Marcella refers to the cabbage dish in Cucina, I think, when she describes being in the markets and seeing a red cabbage. The red cabbage dish is also one that changed a little between the original book and the combined Essentials, perhaps to reduce fat, as was a stated goal, or perhaps just an evolution (in the dish the browned chicken is added to the reduced cabbage, and the rendered fat largely stays behind, cf many of Marcella’s other chicken dishes – sometimes I pour a little in with the browned chicken).
It looks wonderful Jan!