Ugly Crying While Reading The Buried Giant
Plus I'm cooking Roast Chicken and Schmaltz Potatoes
Bookshelf Read: The Buried Giant
When was the last time you stayed up until midnight to finish a book? Were you on your couch, fully aware that the baby would wake up in a scant few hours, but unable to put the book down? Were you pulled by a gravitational force toward the end like a space shuttle hurtling back to earth, almost certainly headed toward a hard landing?
That was me last month, but add a small snowfield of tissues around me on the couch as I ugly-cried for forty-five straight minutes through the last 10% of The Buried Giant. Since I finished, I’ve been trying to go back and reread passages to figure out why this book was able to accomplish such an extreme emotional reaction in me, and I’m still not sure I know.
In The Buried Giant, Beatrice and Axl are an elderly couple trying to get to their son's village. But their true quest is to regain their memories and the memory of the life they lived together. A fog has fallen through the land which, they suspect, is the cause of their amnesia. Eliminate the fog, get their memories back. Cue the adventure.
Recently I heard the quote, “Great books are great because of what they do wrong and the rules they break.” I’ve been thinking about that in relation to The Buried Giant.
For example, common advice is that titles should make sense on multiple levels. That they should intrigue the reader and enrich the story. However, “the buried giant” in this book is a metaphor which only really becomes clear at the end of book. At the end, after waiting an entire book to figure out where the buried giant comes into all this, I should have been mad that it was all a vague geopolitical metaphor, but I wasn’t! How! Did Ishiguro! Do that!?
Ishiguro also introduces a new point of view character we’ve never met halfway through the book to lead us through some emotionally wrenching scenes. I think most creative writing instructors would say don’t do that, but it works! In fact, it makes the book a lot better.
I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from the book, from that random, middle of the book character we meet. He’s an Arthurian knight.
"I shall greet the boatman contentedly, enter his rocking boat, the waters lapping all about, and I may sleep a while, the sound of his oar in my ears. And I will move from slumber to half-waking, and see the sun sunk low over the water, and the shore moved further still, and nod myself back into dreams till the boatman’s voice stirs me gently once more."
Roast Chicken Schmaltz Potatoes
Spring is peeking out in little shoots off my hydrangeas. So before winter is over, I’d like to share a paean to Roast Chicken Schmaltz Potatoes. This is a dish I only cook in the fall and winter, though in the spring when the snap peas, and eventually green beans, come around I have been known to make a Schmaltz Potato Salad Nicoise—more on that a different newsletter.
Roast Chicken Schmaltz Potatoes is a slightly adjusted recipe from Carla Lalli Music’s Where Cooking Begins. It is essentially a roast chicken that bastes the potatoes beneath it with chicken schmaltz. By cooking one dish, you’ve essentially made a main and a side! It’s very time efficient, if roasting a chicken can ever be considered time efficient.
A couple of tips for excellent Schmaltz Potatoes. Salt your chicken inside and out the day before you’re going to roast it, then leave it in the fridge until two-three hours before you’re going to cook the bird. Then allow the chicken to come up to room temp, which will help it roast faster and more evenly.
Lalli Music suggests putting the chicken on one of the oven racks above a cast iron or pan of potatoes. Don’t do that. The chicken WILL stick to the rack. Cleaning it WILL be impossible. Getting the rack/chicken out of the oven is ALWAYS a mess.
Instead, get a little wire cooling rack, like the ones you would cool cookies on, and rest it on top of the largest cast iron or skillet you own. (Within reason—a twelve-inch skillet might be too big.) Pat dry your chicken and then place it on top of the rack.
Quarter up some little gold or red wax potatoes, and maybe give them a teeny drizzle of olive oil and a toss. The oil isn’t necessary, but helps give the potatoes a jump-start crisping up in the oven. You can also thinly slice the potatoes and arrange them in a pretty design on the bottom of the cast iron in a sort of pommes anna if you’re feeling fresh.
Anyway, your potatoes are in the pan, you have a rack on top of the pan, and on top of that is your salted, dry and room temperature chicken. Put that whole contraption in an oven that’s 325 degrees and roast for about 3 hours. You can toss the potatoes in the middle to make sure they’re all getting contact with the cast iron, but you can also not, and most of the time I choose not.
Before things get unseasonably, disturbingly, climate-alteringly warm in your neck of the woods, make yourself some Roast Chicken Schmaltz Potatoes.