Based on a classic Roman recipe for rice and an assortment of savoury delights stuffed into rosy-red tomatoes wearing jaunty hats
Six days a week, at about 10.30am, the smell of roasting chicken climbs in through our first-floor bedroom window. A message from the back kitchen window of the tavola calda (canteen) on the ground floor. When we first moved in, I’d try to remember to close the window, and if I forgot, to waft the intruder away with a towel. Not because I don’t like the smell of roasting chicken, but because it didn’t seem appropriate for the bedroom. Wafting was useless, of course, even closing the window was no guarantee. In fact, any resistance at all seemed to make the smell even stronger. So we stopped resisting, and the smell, as if sensing our acceptance, mellowed in its drift across the room.
Now, four years on, the smell is as much a part of the room as the bedsheets and coconut hair cream. I learn from food scientist Harold McGee that chicken fat, coconut, also pineapple, peaches and dairy products, are abundant with likeable molecules called lactones, which take their name from the Latin word for milk, and are instantly recognisable for a sweet-creamy quality heightened by frying.
Continue reading...from Lifestyle | The Guardian https://ift.tt/Jmqzd26