My life on a plate: the seasons of roast chicken

On the time-travelling pleasures of revisiting a family favourite. Plus: what I've been drinking this week

A roast dinner is, for me, a meal you prepare for family at home, not a dish you pay to eat out. I seem to be in the minority on this, as the nation’s pubs heaving with carvery lunches attest. But then last Sunday sitting in Whole Beast, the resident restaurant of Peckham’s Montpelier pub, I did see the attraction, as our meal conjured up the roast chicken dinners marking out my past.

Chicken is not the half of the Whole Beast’s “nose to tail live fire concept” and this is this not just any pub Sunday lunch, staged as it is in Peckham’s solidly gentrified “Bellenden Village”. Observer restaurant critic Jay Rayner praised the restaurant’s bold and meaty offerings a few weeks ago. While the Sunday menu is less ambitious, among the starters were the kind of robust evening-menu dishes that caught Rayner’s attention –  hash browns with whipped cod’s roe, burnt leek taco with smoked garlic crema and salsa macha.

But we opted for the main event: a medley of roast smoked chicken, pulled pork shoulder, coal-roast pork neck, bacon and beef sausage, with roast potato and tomato salads. It was every bit as meaty a platter as it sounds.

Despite Rayner’s endorsement, which is what attracted us there, fellow diners seemed a solidly local crowd. But I was struck too by what a tight thirtysomething demographic they represented. For many Brits - middle-class urban professionals, at least - these years are your best life, a sweet spot where you finally have enough money to enjoy an expensive city – without yet having acquired family obligations. For a while: among the large group at one nearby table sat the first heralds of the change that will soon transform many of these lives – two young babies.

And as we and they tucked into our roast platters, I realised that this is a dish that spans the different seasons of family life: as TS Eliot almost wrote, I have measured out my life in roast chickens.

Of all my favourite childhood dishes, roast chicken is the one I still find most irresistible. The smell of the bird and the steam rising as you first carve into it; the salty, fatty crispness of the skin; the sensual pleasure of its flesh, simple yet so flavourful.

My family always ate Sunday roast, from when I was quite small. Yet in my 1970s childhood, a chicken was a treat.

All food has become relatively cheaper in countries like Britain over the past half century, but perhaps none more so than chicken. The intensification of poultry production has meant that whereas in 1953, Britain produced five million chickens a year, we now raise around a billion broilers annually. As a result, the average real-terms price of a whole chicken today is little more than half what it was in 1974.

So beef or lamb being more affordable, that is what my mother usually prepared – with a bird as an occasional treat and concession to the fact that my brother and I preferred it to red meat.

After leaving home, however, my life was roast-free for years. When I first cooked, at university, I was sort-of vegetarian to the extent that I didn’t prepare meat myself, and had no oven anyway in my revolting shared kitchen. Plus I wanted to eat more adventurous things than roast chicken: for a boy from the Westcountry, doner kebabs – then unknown in rural Devon – seemed a more enticing option.

I didn’t have the same early adulthood as most young professional Londoners, leaving Britain for graduate school in North Carolina aged 22 and returning to these shores, with a doctorate but penniless, at age 30. Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham is said to have once cooked his bandmates a roast with all the trimmings to assuage their Black Country homesickness while hellraising their way around the United States in the early 70s. I suffered no such cravings stateside, but I can certainly confirm that if you want a roast dinner in the US, you’re going to have to cook it yourself.

I do not remember the occasion on which I finally prepared my favourite childhood feast myself: perhaps for my wife in our first kitchen in south London, perhaps for thirty-something friends in the same era. But the period that sticks in my memory, by which time I was past 40, was roasting a bird and potatoes for my three young children. Suddenly roasts made eminent sense: a big meal to feed many mouths, and a welcome punctuation mark in the weekend family-life maelstrom.

So for perhaps a decade, roast chicken was again a regular pleasure at my table. My favoured recipe is the great English chef Simon Hopkinson’s, from his indispensable Roast Chicken and Other Stories. It’s a model of simplicity: the trussed chicken slathered with butter, seasoning and lemon juice, with the lemon halves, garlic and thyme stuffed into its cavity. After a brief detour into fancier alternatives such as Italian-style “wet roasting”, Hopkinson concludes that “the simple roast bird is the best.” This is true.

Today I am again at a different stage of life, with two children at or finished with university and the remaining one about to leave and having long since gone vegetarian anyway. A whole bird is too much for two: it seems a long time since I last roasted a chicken. I’ll have to settle for Whole Beast’s for the moment.

Roast chicken has drifted in and out of my life, like its savoury fragrance smelt down the hall from the kitchen. Will it return? Life is unpredictable; the pleasures of food cooked for family and friends are a constant.

Family groove: my roast chicken certainly pleased this lot

What I’ve been drinking this week

Cantine Riondo 'Castelforte-Casalforte' Corvina 2020, IGT Veronese - a Valpolicella in all but name, this northern Italian red brims with cherry fruit and lip-smacking acidity. Good value from the merchants listed, though I drank this with my sister-in-law at one of my favourite London Italian restaurants, Bocca di Lupo (D’Arcy Wine Merchants, Shekleton Wines, from £9.10.)

La Rioja Alta Viña Ardanza Reserva 2017, Rioja - classically styled Rioja from one of the region’s grandest producers: sweet fruit, well-integrated American oak, deep and complex - just so delicious. I drank this at last week’s amazing 67 Pall Mall summer party (widely available, from £29 at The Wine Society.)

Saurwein Om Pinot Noir 2021, Hemel-en-Aarde, Western Cape - Jessica Saurwein is a hugely talented South African winemaker, buying in fruit from cool-climate regions including Hemel-en-Aarde, as for this ravishing Pinot Noir. Red berry fruit, beautifully balanced acidity and tannins, complex and long. This is world-class Pinot (Cellar Door Wines, Hedonism Wines, from £47.95.)