A Nostalgic Dinner Party
A comforting chicken parmigiana to take you back in time.
“Fast isn’t always good, and good isn’t always fast”
I heard food writer
say this on the new-to-me podcast, Cooking the Books with . (It’s excellent, by the way, I’ve been binging episodes on my daily 10k step walks… The Debora Robertson episode is from July 2022, so you can see how far down the archives I’ve gone.)Anyway, the conversation was about the joys of having something slowly bubbling on the stove: a long-simmered sauce, a rich braise, a warming soup.
Of course, the podcast is preaching to the choir on this one. Who doesn’t love arriving at a home filled with the warming smells of something delicious in the oven? And what cook doesn’t revel in the adulation of someone walking in the door and happily exclaiming, “It smells good in here!”?
I think Big Food has done a top-notch job of making home cooks feel overwhelmed, incompetent, and simply scared to cook anything from scratch (or near scratch) from the fear we might fail – dinner won’t taste good, people won’t like it, and we will have wasted our time and money while embarrassing ourselves in the process.
Somewhere along the way, CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods), were able to spend their considerable dollars on advertising to convince us regular folk that cooking was beyond our limited abilities.
And we all bought in. Happily. Big Food saved us from our stress-filled, overly scheduled lives. Thanks to them, all we had to do to get dinner on the table is peel back the plastic wrap and zap it in the microwave for a minute or two.
But, fast isn’t always good, and good isn’t always fast.
But good doesn’t ever have to be complicated. In fact, I argue the simpler the better. I used to work in swanky restaurants with starched white tablecloths and many pieces of cutlery. Mercifully, I think those ceremonial dinners are giving way to the casual flow of family style dinners and food-splattered linens.
This week I share the details of one of my favourite dinner parties. Centred around chicken parmigiana, that 1980’s nostalgic classic of checkered tablecloth, red-sauce restaurants, this menu is casual, comforting, and totally welcomed by everyone. In true Quaintrelle Ethos, most is made well ahead of time, and I’ve even included a few options for store bought items when you want to speed things along.
Nostalgic Chicken Parmigiana
I’m a child of the 80’s and I remember everything about that decade fondly: especially the food and the restaurants. They were so bad they were great.
I grew up in Guelph, Ontario, a city with a very strong Italian population (those Italian Canadian Club dances from my youth were lit).
From how I remember it, every restaurant from casual to fancy served some version of chicken parm. And for some reason the highfalutin places with the tuxedoed waiters that you went to on your birthday or after a Christening or some other formal engagement, served the worst chicken parmigiana: soggy crust, dried out or rubbery chicken (some places even managed to get it dry and rubbery, how they did it was a culinary marvel), bland, watery sauce. Not good. Even to an eight-year-old.
Avoiding all those pitfalls isn’t difficult. So in my recipe, which has a surprise twist, we do a few things differently: