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When I was little (around five years old), my favorite food was Nonna’s Garlic Chicken. When we visited Nonna and brought back leftovers from her house, the next morning I would ask to eat it for breakfast.

There are parts of ourselves we are born with, and I don’t think they change, like the part of me that wants garlic chicken every morning for breakfast, and the part of her that always made sure to have some when I came to visit. Neither of us gets to do either in the Real anymore, but somewhere I know we still are.

→→→ The bottom of this email has a recipe for Nonna’s Garlic Chicken.

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There were three Settepane sisters. Francesca was the youngest, my Nonna Oliva is in the middle, and Angelina was the oldest. Angelina lived in Ridgewood (about 300 feet from Pierogi Boys and Rolo’s), and we would visit her every year on Christmas Day. Her house always smelled of Moka pot espresso.

Unlike my Nonna, who spoke a mixture of Sicilian and English, Angelina only spoke Sicilian. When she was impassioned and screaming, her voice would get very shrill. Whenever we entered or exited her presence, my brother and I would receive a quick barrage of smooches in succession on our forehead, our arms, our cheeks, wherever made sense seasonally. It was her thing, and it was good.

On the last Christmas with Angelina, I opened a drawer in her kitchen looking for a fork and found this:

A drawer filled with Dannon lids that had been cleaned, washed, and collected. M A N Y of them.

That was the same day she went to touch a very hot pan without an oven mitt. I stopped her just in time. She looked at me, perplexed, and I was little enough for it to spook me pretty thoroughly. I didn’t know then that I would be experiencing a version of this with my Nonna for the next twenty-five years.

Years after she passed, Angelina came to me in a dream.

But the wildest moment with Angelina has to be towards the end of her life, after she had stopped speaking. At some point, she just stopped. She would sit and look off into the distance, then look present, and back and forth. After the loss of one of her sons, Joe, she was never the same person. It was too devastating. She had been declining rapidly since then.

So, no one in my family believes me that this moment happened, but it did. It happened so definitively, I can’t wait to share it with you. We were all around the dinner table at my Nonna’s house: Nonna, my brother, my father, Angelina, me, and my best friend at the time. My friend and I were talking about going out to a movie after dinner, and my brother and father were giving us A LOT of shit, saying Stay home! Why would you want to go out? Aren’t you tired? It’s not necessary!

Angelina was sitting next to me and my friend. She had not spoken a word all evening. Suddenly, she grabbed my arm hard, leaned in, and said in a commanding whisper — Stay out until the sun comes out!

If this sentiment were a song (at least the very very beginning of one) maybe it would be something spooky and sad like this diddy:

The other day, I accidentally came across the prayer card from her funeral. It’s now on my altar next to my David Lynch bookmark. I think they would have liked one another.

It all feels very Chauncey Gardiner from Being There. “Life is a state of mind.” Roast Chicken is a state of mind. Si.

One method:

The roast chicken method below is one that I mentioned to Natasha years ago, which is absolutely delicious, essentially fail-safe in terms of moisture and savoriness, and also excellent for home ovens in general.

Another method:

And here is the reverse of the above method. These excerpts are from an interview for TASTE many moons ago with the lovely Matt Rodbard:

Millicent Souris (before she was my good friend when I took a meat cooking class with her at Brooklyn Kitchen) taught me the potato thing. YUM. All the fat drips down and it’s very special. And my friend Nathan Ricke (owner of Esme across the street) told me once to put a big slice of bread under the chicken, and lemme tell ya - YOU MUST DO THIS.

Yet another method:

Another favorite method of mine is to roast the chicken covered in foil at 500F for 45 minutes. Then rip off the foil, turn off the oven, and let the chicken sit in the slowly lowering oven for another 45 minutes to an hour. This reminds me of chickens that have been on a spit or a grill and get a little bit of that charred flavor on the outside and an almost fluffiness on the inside.

And there is YET ANOTHER METHOD for the recipe below.

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to swap out the chicken fat for vegetarian bouillon powder dissolved in 1 ½ cups of hot water, plus ¼ cup of extra virgin olive oil. Cook this sauce on its own in the oven and pour it over anything you desire, or bake it along with some of these alternatives:

Things that are chicken-y: oyster mushrooms, jackfruit, cauliflower

Things that will also just taste really great: potatoes, potatoes, potatoes, beans + greens, what else? Answer on Archestratus World if you feel like it! What is Archestratus World? I have not explained this to you, but it’s completely free if you want to try it and take a chance. More on this in the next newsletter.

I wrote down everything Nonna used to make and planned on doing something nice with it. This is what transpired. Anyhoo, in honor of her 104th birthday, here is a complete list of Nonna’s Canon!