Marcella Hazan's 2-Ingredient Roast Chicken Makes This Fruit The Star

Marcella Hazan said that she started cooking so she could provide quality meals for her beloved husband Victor, but through her recipes, she has fed many, many more. Much as Julia Child introduced the techniques of French cooking to American housewives, Hazan helped make Italian cooking desirable and accessible to those of us who have never had a nonna to show us the difference between spaghetti and tagliatelle. Her recipes could be deceptively simple while still containing great depths of flavor. Her famed tomato sauce, for instance, only requires tomatoes, butter, and onions; even more popular is her roast chicken recipe, which requires nothing more than chicken and lemons (plus salt and pepper for seasoning, of course.)

Other chefs make use of all sorts of aromatics for their roast chickens, but not Hazan. No garlic or onion-related frippery for her, thank you very much: according to her recipe, all you need are a pair of smallish lemons, which you will soften by rolling across the counter before stabbing them a whole bunch of times (so they can release their aroma, as well as to help you relieve any stress from your day.) Then, shove them inside the chicken and let it roast. It's as simple and delicious a recipe as Hazan's five-ingredient bean soup.

It's true that Marcella Hazan's roast chicken recipe is a great deal less involved than, say, Thomas Keller's oven-roasted chicken, which requires a capillary-bursting attention to detail that is enough to drive any home cook mad. But while Hazan's recipe is easy, it's also not quite foolproof — there are some steps you should take to make sure your chicken comes out just right. For one thing, she asks you to truss up the chicken once you insert the lemons into its cavity and close it up without pulling the string too tight. Otherwise, the heat inside the chicken may be unable to escape, causing it to burst.

Hazan also recommends turning the chicken over halfway through the cooking process while being careful not to puncture the skin. This is a somewhat less urgent matter than the previous step, as the worst that will happen if you puncture the skin is that your chicken is slightly less plump and juicy on the dinner table. Still, if you're going to all this trouble, you might as well get every step right, you know?  Let the chicken rest before carving, serve it with Anthony Bourdain's silky mashed potatoes (which were really Joël Robuchon's mashed potatoes), and thank Marcella later.