The Comfort of Chicken

In a pretty regular pattern for me now, I get inspired by Vocal Challenges and then proceed to miss the deadline, haha. Sometimes, I’ll only have an idea with no words actually written, but I had actually started a draft for the “Taste of Home” Challenge.

This Challenge, however, made me realize that chicken is the basis for most of the comfort dishes in my family. Rather than a full stickler to the Challenge guidelines, this piece is instead an exploration of food and my family and good feelings. And chicken, of course.

Thinking of chicken comfort dishes, my mom and my grandmother immediately come to mind. My grandmother’s special, potluck-approved chicken and dressing is one of my mom’s absolute favorite meals. I mostly associate it with holidays like Thanksgiving, but my grandmother would break out this recipe for my mom on regular days of the week, too, when she was little. The smell of it cooking would welcome my mom home as she stepped off the school bus, got a whiff, and became even more excited to dig into supper.

My mom has continued her mother’s legacy of cooking a chicken comfort dish. It’s a recipe for chicken casserole kept on an index card in a little green tin with the others of her collection she started while in her high-school Home Ec class. She often makes her chicken casserole for me for special occasions or when I’m a bit down, and it’s so lovely. A rich, creamy base with chicken and a buttery, Ritz-cracker crust sprinkled on top make this casserole so good. (So good, in fact, that my family and I—perpetual left-overs put-awayers—often almost completely finish the casserole in one sitting.)

It’s sort of interesting to me, too, that these chicken comfort foods don’t just exist on my maternal family lines. My dad has his own repertoire.

I have memories of when we used to live in an apartment in town and being in the kitchen helping him put together his chicken a la king when I was in elementary school. He used to get mushrooms that were Saran-wrapped in a blue styrofoam-like box, and we’d cut them in the egg slicer.

These he’d add into the cream sauce along with chicken, pimentos, green bell peppers, and salt and pepper. Once the sauce was done, we’d ladle it over white rice and dip Rainbo rolls into it.

These rolls were small rectangles all packed into an aluminum container. They were slightly sweet and highly addictive. We only ever found them at a local grocery store.

Chicken a la king is a little bit different now. We’re in the house my mom and dad built rather than the apartment. My dad still makes it for us, but uses pre-cut mushrooms now instead.

And there are no Rainbo rolls. The local grocery store has since changed owners and names, but even before then they were becoming hard to find.

The meal is still fantastic, though, and my mom and I are always happy when my dad decides to fix it for us.

But there is another dish my dad will make for us.

“We’re going to have Dad’s chicken tonight,” he announces every so often as I head out for work. He’s not referring to himself. He’s instead talking about a recipe he recreated of his own father’s, cooked in the same fryer used by his dad for until just recently when the appliance finally stopped working (after about 30 years of service).

‘Dad’s chicken’ doesn’t entail just chicken. It means fried chicken where the remaining oil and liquid are cooked into a thick gravy to coat the chicken and top mashed potatoes. Crowder peas are often another side dish.

My dad grew up with his father cooking for the family just as I have. His dad learned to cook while in the army during World War II. This learning experience wasn’t necessarily of his own volition, though.

My dad talks about how his mom told him she’d receive letters from his dad during the war: sometimes he was Private Aaron, then up to Corporal Aaron, then back to Private Aaron.

Cooking was a reprimand, but it became something he enjoyed. Something he shared with his family.

He passed away a few years before I was born, so I never got to enjoy the original version of ‘Dad’s chicken’. But my mom did. In fact, she had a dream of him after he’d passed of him with the fryer, cooking his chicken. She said the dream was so vivid that she could see the grease popping. He checked on her and asked how she was doing.

A love of food and cooking is something my family and I all share. Being able to cook for each other and bring each other a bit of happiness, a bit of comfort is just another way we show how much we all mean to each other.