Sunday Dinner: Provençal Chicken

The Sunday meal, taken together, is a time-honored tradition I'm especially fond of. Growing up we sat around the Irish wake table in chinoiserie-papered dining room for a multi-course meal at the punctuating holidays. Our ritual on a ordinary Sunday evening was a drive downtown to a nondescript Mexican restaurant across the street from a toweringly fancy hotel. I remember gold foil-wrapped pats of soft butter spread on hot corn tortillas that were pulled out of plastic containers like rabbits out of a hat and the ketchup my dad ordered for the kids to dip their chips in. Sunday nights can be achingly sad -- the work week looms, the fun is over, and somehow, it seems the sun sets earlier than any other night of the week. But in the Mexican restaurant where old-fashioned vaquero music played on the juke box, traditional striped blankets hung on the wall, and each meal ended with the ceremonial choosing of a Dum-Dum from the bowl at the cash register, we were happy, and the week seemed held at bay for awhile longer.

Later, when I was in Italy for a few months during college, my board did not include Sunday dinner. This was especially inconvenient given that Sundays saw the rattling metal grates firmly shut over the front doors of cafes and trattorias, barring the way to wild boar sausage and cannellini bean soup. At the breakfast table that first Sunday, over the strong coffee that made me happier than any other part of the morning spread, my host mother invited my roommate and I for dinner that afternoon. She made it clear that the meal was not one we had paid for (ahem), but that she would be happy to have us join her family. Their table, a long wooden farmhouse table with a fruit bowl at one end, was in the kitchen. During that meal, the 2 o'clock sunshine would slant through the window and we ate homemade pasta excitedly, its one appearance for the week. For me, aching with a loneliness for what (or rather, who) I'd left behind in Minnesota, Sunday dinner at that table with the sealed pockets of ravioli and a surrogate family was heaven.

Soon after I came back from Florence, my dear friend hosted a Sunday dinner of her own. I sat on the green bar stool at the high ledge in her kitchen alternately sipping coffee and wine as she made a great Caesar salad and two fat roast chickens. She fed eight of us that day, and we crowded around a table pulled out into the middle of her living room floor. I remember being happy then, too, and also, feeling at home.

If I had more pals in this neighborhood I love so much, I'd like to think I'd be cooking up Sunday dinner with them to stave off the Sunday blues. Then again, maybe there's a bit of Field of Dreams at play here: if I cook, will they come? Because there is no better day than Sunday, especially when you do not have a couple hundred pages of Hawthorne to read, or are not walking around a foreign city, addicted to your own melancholy, or are not still heartbreakingly young, completely at the whims of the adults in your life, to sit down with some people you happen to like, even just a bit, and toast one last time to the weekend.



Chicken Provençal
Serves 4, adapted from Gourmet March 2008

1 1/2 pound tomatoes, cut into wedges
2 large onion, cut into wedges, leaving root ends intact
1/2 cup drained brine-cured black olives, pitted if desired
5 large garlic cloves, sliced
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons herbes de Provence, divided
1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 whole chicken (about 3 1/2 pound), washed and patted dry

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Toss the tomatoes, onion, olives, garlic, fennel, and 1 teaspoon herbes de Provence with the olive oil. Push to one side of roasting pan. Nestle the chicken in next to the vegetables and season with the remaining teaspoon herbes de Provence, as well as plenty of salt and pepper. Roast in oven until the juices from the chicken run clear with no traces of pink, about 1 1/2 hours. Let the chicken rest for 10-15 minutes. Serve chicken with vegetables, pan juices, and some crusty bread to soak up every bit of juice.