My best old friend Jorge Ramon calls it “Jazz Cooking.” It’s that kind of cooking you do when you don’t really have a plan other than to eat, and you don’t really have a schedule other than sometime soon-ish.
It’s that kind of cooking that happens when you put on a CD you haven’t heard in a while, one of your old favorites, and you poke through the cabinets, humming as you go, to get a handle on what’s available.
Then, inspired, you wing it.
You know, improvising. Within boundaries. Kind of like (not really, but kind of) jazz. A kitchen jam session.
I’ve had two rounds of jazz cooking in the past week. One session produced a toss of Spanish rice and griddled shrimps (they were about to go bad) and Worcestershire sauce, scooped into a bowl and topped with a fried egg. (The soundtrack to that session was Nickle Creek’s eponymous 2000 album, which hinges on the wrenching “When You Come Back Down.”)
The other session produced a much better dish: Chicken thighs braised with pancetta, cabbage, olives and sherry. Maybe it was the soundtrack (I started out with Beethoven’s sixth symphony, the “Pastoral,” but canned it after the saccharine third movement and, peevish, dialed my iPod to Guru’s Jazzmatazz Volume 2, which seemed to make more sense after a glass of sherry), but it was the best dish of the week.
The point, with jazz cooking, isn’t to follow a recipe. It’s to install yourself in the kitchen and see what you can come up with. It’s about having an idea, changing your mind in the middle, adding ideas together, seeing what happens. It’s about eating, eventually, but it’s about the process of getting there too.
It’s about the discoveries you make (some harmonious, some discordant), the detours you take (some fruitful, some dead ends), and the soul you put into it. It’s about knowing that this dish, the one you’re making right now, has never before been made in this exact way, and probably never will be again, because if you’re taking notes as you go, you’re not really jazz cooking.
That’s the reason this recipe doesn’t have precise measurements, or exact cooking times — or any rules, really. It’s just a feeble attempt at codifying, after the fact, something I did in the kitchen under the influence of music.
Chicken thighs braised with pancetta, cabbage, olives and sherry
Makes enough for two.
Ingredients
A drizzle of olive oil
A handful of cubed pancetta
An onion, sliced
4 chicken thighs, skin-on, bone-in
A couple cloves of garlic, smashed
Half a head of cabbage, chopped
A cup or so of sherry or wine
A few olives of your choice, chopped
A lemon, halved
Directions
Turn on the oven to about 300 degrees. Drizzle the olive oil into an oven-proof frying pan. Fry the pancetta slowly over medium-low heat, until it has rendered most of its fat. Toss in the onions. Cook them until soft. Remove pancetta and onions to a bowl, but leave the fat in the pan. Fry the chicken thighs, skin down, until brown. This will take five or so minutes. Remove them. Toss the garlic and the cabbage into the pan, and stir them around to coat. Return the onions and pancetta. Stir. Add the sherry. Place the chicken thighs, skin side up, on top of the cabbage mixture. Toss olives over all and nestle the lemon halves between the thighs. Slide the pan into the oven, uncovered, for about 45 minutes, adding a half-cup or so of water halfway through. Serve straight from the pan.
