How to Roast Chicken Thighs

At home, we eat rice every day. It is white. We cook it in a pot with water. My mother cooks it. We eat the rice with vegetables and a little meat. It is simple. It is good.

This is a simple recipe for fried rice. It is quick and easy. You need cooked rice, two eggs, oil, salt, and one onion. First, cut the onion into small pieces. Then, put oil in a hot pan and cook the onion for two minutes. After that, break the eggs into the pan and stir them. When the eggs are almost cooked, add the rice and a little salt. Cook everything together for three minutes. Stir all the time. Finally, taste it. Add more salt if you need to. Eat it hot. It is a simple meal, but it is very good.

This is my mother's recipe for lentil soup. It is the meal she cooked when one of us was sick, and it is still my comfort food on cold evenings. It is cheap, healthy, and very forgiving — you can change the vegetables depending on what you have.

You will need: a cup of red lentils, one onion, two carrots, two cloves of garlic, two tablespoons of olive oil, a teaspoon of cumin, salt, black pepper, and the juice of half a lemon. About six cups of water.

First, wash the lentils until the water runs clear. This removes the dust and small stones, and stops the soup from being cloudy. Cut the onion, carrots, and garlic into small pieces.

Heat the oil in a large pot. Add the onion and cook gently for 5 minutes until it is soft. Don't let it become brown — cook it slowly. Add the garlic and the cumin and stir for one minute. The smell is the moment you know it is going right.

Add the carrots, the lentils, and the water. Bring everything to a boil, then turn the heat down. Cook for about 25 minutes, until the lentils are soft and starting to break apart.

Add salt and black pepper. Squeeze the lemon juice in at the end — this is important, because the lemon makes the whole soup come alive.

Eat with bread. It is a simple meal, but on a cold day, it is exactly what you want.

What follows is a recipe, more or less, for the soup my grandfather used to make on Sundays. It is a chicken broth with rice and lemon, and although there is a Greek dish called avgolemono that resembles it closely, what we ate at my grandfather's table was simpler, and not the same. He never wrote it down, so what I have now is a version assembled out of taste memory and best guesses.

For four bowls, you need: a small chicken or two large legs, an onion, a stick of celery, a carrot, a cup of short-grain rice, two eggs, the juice of one and a half lemons, salt, and pepper. There is no garlic. My grandfather thought garlic in this soup was a sign of bad upbringing, and although I now think this was a small prejudice rather than a real culinary principle, I still don't add it.

Put the chicken, the onion (cut in half), the celery and the carrot into a large pot. Cover with cold water and bring slowly to a simmer. Skim the grey foam that rises to the surface. Add a generous pinch of salt. Let it cook gently for an hour and a half — the surface should barely move.

Lift the chicken out and let it cool. Strain the broth through a sieve. Discard the vegetables; their job is done. Take the meat off the bones and cut it into pieces.

Bring the broth back to a simmer. Add the rice and cook for about fifteen minutes, until tender. Add the chicken back into the pot. Now the part that used to mystify me as a child: in a separate bowl, beat the eggs with the lemon juice. Add a ladle of hot broth to the egg mixture, whisking continuously. Add another ladle, whisking. Then pour the mixture, slowly, back into the pot, off the heat, stirring all the time. The soup will thicken slightly and turn pale.

Serve with black pepper and another squeeze of lemon if you like. Eat it on a Sunday, ideally when something has gone wrong in the week.

What I notice now, cooking it, is that I am not really following a recipe. I am following him. Recipes can preserve a sequence of steps, but the things he taught me without saying — the patience, the not-rushing, the small disciplines around what to put in and what to leave out — are not in any recipe at all. They are still in the kitchen, only because I choose to keep them there.

What I want to write about is the lentil soup my mother made for us when we were ill, but to do it honestly I have to admit, before I begin, that the version of the recipe I am about to give is partial. My mother is from a small town in the south of the country I grew up in; her mother before her cooked over a single gas flame, with whatever lentils were cheap that month and whatever vegetables had been forgotten in the bottom of the basket. The recipe my mother taught me is not that recipe, exactly. It is what the family soup became after a generation of more reliable supermarkets and slightly larger kitchens. The ancestor of this recipe was, I suspect, hungrier and more inventive. I cannot fully recover it, and I would rather acknowledge the loss than pretend I am cooking what my grandmother cooked.

With that on the table: for four bowls, you need a cup of red lentils, one onion, two carrots, two cloves of garlic, two tablespoons of olive oil, a teaspoon of cumin, salt, black pepper, the juice of half a lemon, and around six cups of water. Optionally, a pinch of dried mint at the end, which my mother added and her mother did not. The mint, I now think, is a marker of the soup's changed ambition — a small ornament that the original would not have wasted.

Wash the lentils in a sieve until the water runs clear. This removes the dust and the small stones, and prevents the soup from being cloudy. The first generation of this soup was probably less worried about cloudiness; cloudy soup, in its origin context, was just soup. The cleanliness of the modern broth is a small piece of aesthetic adjustment. Worth doing, but worth noticing.

Dice the onion, carrots, and garlic. Heat the oil in a heavy pot over a low flame, and cook the onion patiently for five or six minutes, stirring occasionally, until it is soft but not brown. Add the garlic and cumin and let them release their oils into the pan for a minute. The smell, at this point, is the moment when a kitchen begins to assert itself.

Add the carrots, the lentils, and the water. Bring everything slowly to a simmer, then turn the heat down so that the surface barely moves. Cook, partly covered, for around twenty-five minutes, until the lentils have softened and started to break down. The texture should be loose, not stiff; if the soup tightens, add water without ceremony. Salt and pepper at the end. Squeeze the lemon juice in just before serving, and scatter the mint, if you are using it, across the bowls.

Eat it on a difficult evening. It is the soup that a mother cooks for an unwell child, and it remains capable of doing that work for an adult, in a different country, after a long week.

A final thing. The recipe I have just given assumes a stove, a pot, lentils sold by weight in any supermarket, and an evening with twenty-five minutes of broadly unsupervised cooking time. None of these is universal. The soup my grandmother made was simpler in some senses — fewer ingredients, less cumin — and harder in others, in that it had to be made with much less. To call this recipe 'simple' is fair, but only in the way most simplicity in modern cookery is fair: simple given a kitchen, given a body that has the energy to stand at a stove for half an hour, given a flame that comes on when a knob is turned. The soup is a good soup. It is also, like most good things passed down through families, partial — a version of itself, surviving by adapting, kept alive by hands that no longer cook in the conditions that first produced it.

It is possible to write a recipe for the lentil soup my grandmother made — a real recipe, with measurements and cooking times — and it is also possible, having written that recipe, to feel that what one has written is not the soup. Some of this is the ordinary insufficiency of any document about practical knowledge; some of it, in this case, is more particular. My grandmother cooked the soup for fifty years in a small kitchen in a small town in the south of a country I no longer live in, and the recipe I am about to give is, by necessity, a recipe in translation: my approximate version of her approximate version of what her own mother had taught her. The losses, in this chain, are unrecoverable. I would rather note them than pretend to have escaped them.

For four bowls, you need a cup of red lentils, one onion, two carrots, two cloves of garlic, two tablespoons of olive oil, a teaspoon of cumin, salt and black pepper, the juice of half a lemon, and around six cups of water. Optionally, a pinch of dried mint at the end — an addition my mother introduced, and that I have kept, and that my grandmother would, I suspect, have raised an eyebrow at. The recipe has a history; the recipe also has a present.

Wash the lentils until the water runs clear; this is mainly aesthetic, since cloudy soup, in the soup's origin context, was just soup. Dice the onion, carrots, and garlic. Heat the oil in a heavy pot over a low flame; cook the onion patiently for five or six minutes, stirring occasionally, until soft but not browned. Add the garlic and cumin and let them release their oils into the pan for a minute. Add the carrots, the lentils, and the water. Bring slowly to a simmer; turn the heat down so that the surface barely moves; cook, partly covered, for around twenty-five minutes, until the lentils have softened and started to break down. Salt and pepper at the end. Squeeze the lemon juice in just before serving.

What the recipe does not say is that my grandmother cooked the soup, in summer, on a stove-top whose flame was almost too small for the pot, and that the slow cooking was therefore not a culinary refinement but a feature of the equipment, raised by her, over time, into a virtue. The recipe does not say that she tasted the soup six or seven times during cooking, and that her hand on the salt was a record of those tastings rather than of any rule. The recipe does not say that the lemon, in her version, was sometimes replaced by sour green plums in late summer, when they were cheap, and that this was not a variation but a piece of the soup's actual history.

A more careful recipe might say all of this. The trouble is that more careful recipes acquire, after a certain length, the air of an obituary — they are about a soup that no longer happens — and what I want, in writing this, is for the soup to keep happening, in other kitchens, with other small histories accreting around it. Some loss in the writing is the price of that.

I am aware, as I write the previous paragraph, that I am doing the thing I would, in a more sceptical mood, criticise. I am claiming that my refusal to be more thorough is itself a kind of fidelity to the dish; I am dressing my insufficiency in literary clothing. The essay form is, structurally, very forgiving of this kind of move — perhaps too forgiving. The honest position is that I am not, in fact, my grandmother, and that the soup I cook is a soup of mine, descended from hers, that I would like other people to cook in their own kitchens, with their own descents and adaptations, and that none of this is best served by a more anxious recipe. It is an argument that suits me. It is also, I think, true, but I do not particularly trust the convergence.

Eat the soup with bread. Eat it on a difficult evening. Eat it, if you can, with someone you love. The recipe ends; the soup, with luck, keeps going.