I’ve experienced an epiphany of late concerning, of all things, the humdrum business of roasting a chicken.
For many years I have sworn by the Julia Child technique, as laid out in careful detail in “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”. It’s not precisely a difficult operation, but Julia’s hover-and-baste style does require a certain commitment. That it produces a fine roast chicken goes without saying.
But I discovered the Thomas Keller (he of French Laundry fame) recipe, which approaches the process quite differently. Instead of basting and turning and salting in increments, the Keller technique is simplicity itself. It consists of a blazingly hot oven (475 degrees), birdie dried off as thoroughly as possible, lots of salt inside and outside birdie (we’re talking like a whole tablespoon or more here), a simple trussing, and then just plopping the thing in a baking pan and letting ‘er rip for 20 minutes per pound. After you remove birdie from the oven, then you slather it with melted butter, which brings out a golden-red sheen to that sizzling crisp skin.
I like the Julia recipe, but I love the Keller style. Not just because it’s a set-it-and-forget-it recipe that makes life easier, but because it produces the best damn roast chicken I’ve ever had in my life. Especially if you add one more step and line the bottom of the roasting pan with a thick layer of sliced potatoes with a bit of onion, which serves the practical purpose of absorbing the hot fat (which would otherwise smoke dreadfully) as well as producing ridiculously wonderful potatoes, what with all that chicken fat.
Naturally, one must use a decent quality chicken, but that doesn’t necessarily mean buying some rare heritage job. An organic, free-range birdie will do just fine.
Now, besides offering me an opportunity to share a disarmingly simple recipe, what does a roast chickie have to do with anything?
Plenty, as I let the idea percolate. Complication has its uses, but there is a lot to be said for concentrated simplicity. One can do a good job with something by making everything big and fancy, perhaps unnecessarily complicated, but solid nonetheless. But one can also cut it down to just what’s needed, and no more. Whether such minimalism is actually better isn’t always all that clear, but most of the time simplicity is a virtue.
Even though I don’t teach much piano any more, I still see a few students each week. One of the biggest issues that arises in playing the instrument is the efficient use of energy. I love demonstrating to students my ability to deliver a string-snapping fortississimo with little effort and no big amount of motion. It’s all in the application of the force, all in the precise focusing of that energy into one single locus, i.e., the key, and not wasting any of the energy on extraneous motion, or spraying the energy all the way through one’s playing apparatus via poor arm angles or bad wrist position or whatnot. In fact, getting good tone out of the piano—at any volume—requires precise application of energy.
Analysis is one of my subjects, in particular the Schenkerian variety. One of the bugaboos with Schenkerian analysis (and I think a reason why some people consider it more a religion than a valid analytic technique) is that it is far too easy to turn out ultra-techie-looking charts that don’t actually explain much of anything. My students know that I’m an advocate of simplicity in Schenker charts—don’t just throw in a lot of beams and slurs and dotted lines unless you actually know what you mean by them, and unless you actually have a reason for including them.
Writing is another of those activities in which simplicity trumps complication. Glutinous academic prose, jawbreaking legalese, educationese, and the various obfuscatory styles that sap the spirit and dull the mind are all attacks on communication and understanding. Of course the immense resources of English are to be used and enjoy; to write with simplicity does not mean to limit the prose to a second-grade Kinkaid level. But to write with the laser-like directness of Joan Didion requires tremendous skill, talent, and a ton of rewrites.
But it doesn’t have to be all simplicity and directness. If that were the case, then most of us wouldn’t want to have anything to do with, say, Mahler or Bleak House or Renoir or curries. No: there’s a place for everything. One day salmon mousse encased in puff pastry, another day a perfectly steamed little stalk of asparagus. There’s room for both.
But I’m not willing to include academic prose glop. Certain things are just plain awful, after all.