Marcella Hazan, Jamie Oliver, Faith Durand, Marian Drabkin, & me
1 roasting chicken, about 4 lbs
2- 2 ½ cups whole milk
Sage leaves
Zest of a whole lemon
8 garlic cloves, unpeeled
Olive oil, Butter, Salt
In an oven-proof pot, melt the butter and olive oil. Salt the chicken and brown it over medium high heat on all sides. I use a deep glazed cast iron Lodge pot. (This is actually the hardest part of the recipe). You may wish to pour off some of the oil after browning, or not. Put everything else: milk, sage leaves, lemon zest, and garlic cloves in the pot. Put it in a 375° oven, uncovered, for an hour and a half. When it’s done, the chicken can be dismembered with a fork, or your hands. If the sauce is too thin, boil it down. It is not pretty looking, but those little nuggets of milk and herbs are delicious. The advantage to not peeling the garlic is that the cloves perfume the sauce, but those who love to mush cooked garlic into their meat can do so, and those who don’t can avoid them.
I believe this is the best chicken I have ever eaten, with the possible exception of the roast chicken at Zuni in San Francisco. It is even better than the chicken I ate in Paris, which I still dream about.
