Chicken Parm

Sometimes it’s all about memory. After a weekend of seemingly endless stacking of wood, cooking various hot sauces, and cooking out of our out-of-control refrigerator, Monday night I wanted something comforting. Preferably nothing that looked like anything in our refrigerator. I wanted tomato sauce, melted mozzarella, and that deep fried crisp taste of an old-time veal parmigiana. Preferably served in an oval dish, but why quibble? If I got the taste, I’d be happy. it’s not just the nostalgia, in fact it wasn’t the nostalgia at all. It was that taste that I remembered and how comforting it was.

We hit Roberto’s in Northampton. Traditional red sauce joint with pizza and a section on the menu with orders for 25 in case you are planning a party. No veal parm on the menu, but they had chicken parm. I ordered it warily, afraid of the actual chicken breast I’d had elsewhere, badly breaded and too too dry. I worried about it all through the iceberg lettuce mixed salad. When our waitress set the dish in front of me, misgivings evaporated. Melted mozzarella, tinged brown and bubbly here and there, covered a deep, dark, crisp breading. The crumbs were the size of large grains of sand and they’d been deep fried into a crust that was a separate thing from the chicken to which it adhered. One bite said it all. There is wok hai, the taste that a hot wok imparts to a stir fry. And there is the red-sauce version, where a hot fryolator can turn a commercial breading on a chicken patty into something that tastes like Sunday nights with my folks, at the Italian place on Sutphin Blvd that we always called “Mrs. O’Hara’s” after the cashier and my parents’ secret joy at an Italian restaurant named for an Irish woman.

If I were snobbier, I’d never have set foot in the place. If I ate my age, fried foods would never pass my lips and probably not whole milk mozzarella either. If I was a foodie, I’d have been somewhere else, looking for Northern Italian fusion topped with foam. If I was a serious cook, I’d have been topping local veal with homemade mozzarella and tomato sauce cooked down from ripe Romas and local garlic. (OK, I’d have done that, but I was tired.)

If I were any of these things, I never would have tasted Sunday night on a holiday Monday. Sarah and I might not have laughed all the way to Northampton and not spent the drive back deciding that the best dessert was the watermelon we had at home.  If I were any of these things, I would have missed out. Sometimes, you get exactly what you want to taste.