The first time I successfully roasted a chicken was the first time that I felt like a real cook. I remember it vividly: I was 20 or so and was having a guy who gave me butterflies over for dinner. The meals that I typically made for friends — briny puttanesca packed with olives, skillet-griddled burgers with too much cheese, slow-simmered pozole — felt either too sloppy or overwrought.
Roast chicken, on the other hand, felt indisputably classic; it was the kind of meal that some cream-clad Nancy Meyers protagonist would pull out of the oven before brushing waves of perfectly tousled hair out of her eyes (just in time to see her ex-lover gazing at her adoringly from the kitchen door frame). Put another way, roast chicken was a symbol of adulthood and domesticity and, at the time, I desperately wanted to appear like both were effortless for me. So, I spent hours scanning roast chicken recipes online, noting similarities and differences between them.
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