Barbecue Chicken

Summer solstice week, the longest days, and the house fills with light the way a jar fills with honey — slowly, thickly, with a sweetness that saturates everything it touches. A year ago this week I was writing about country captain chicken and Carrie's departure for New York. Now Carrie is a high school senior-to-be working at the library, and James is in Columbia learning the law, and Mama is further into the fog, and Joy is painting at Pathways, and Robert is sanding wood in the workshop, and I am here, in the kitchen, where I have always been and where I will always be, stirring something that matters.

The Magnolia House paperwork is nearly complete. The medical evaluation is done. The psychological assessment found Joy to be "well-adjusted and socially engaged," which is the clinical way of saying what Sandra has always said: Joy makes everyone happy. The family interview is next week. Robert and I will go together. We will answer questions about Joy's history, her needs, her preferences. We will not cry during the interview. (We will cry after, in the car, the way we cried after Dr. Ellis's first counseling session — together, privately, the crying of two people who are doing a hard thing and who need the other person to witness the hardness.)

Carrie asked me this week why I became a librarian instead of a writer. The question was asked at the kitchen table, after dinner, with the casual delivery of a girl who has no idea she has just asked the most important question of her mother's life. I said: "I became a librarian because I was afraid to be a writer. A librarian organizes other people's words. A writer produces her own. And producing your own words means they can be rejected, and I was not brave enough, at twenty-two, to risk rejection." Carrie said, "Are you brave enough now?" I said, "I'm getting there." She said, "Good," and went upstairs to read, and the conversation was over, and the conversation was everything.

Mama made sweet tea this week — unsupervised, unassisted, perfect. She boiled the water, steeped the bags, added the sugar while the tea was hot ("always while it's hot, Naomi, cold tea won't dissolve the sugar, and undissolved sugar is a sin against hospitality"), and poured it into the pitcher with the steady hand of a woman who has made sweet tea ten thousand times and whose ten-thousand-and-first time was as good as the first. I did not comment. I drank the tea. I tasted the sugar and the memory and the stubborn persistence of a skill that the disease has not yet reached.

I made country captain chicken — the same dish I made a year ago, the curried Charleston classic, the dish that proves the kitchen is a port of entry. The repetition was intentional. The year has been a circle, and the circle closes here, at the stove, with curry powder and tomatoes and the understanding that the cooking goes on even when everything else changes. The cooking is the constant. The constant is the life.

I said the cooking is the constant, and I meant it—but constants need a second example to prove they’re real, and this barbecue chicken has been mine all summer: made on weeknights when Carrie comes home from the library, made on Sundays when Robert surfaces from the workshop smelling of cedar, made the evening after Mama’s sweet tea, when the pitcher was still on the counter and the kitchen smelled like sugar and time. It is not complicated. It is not meant to be. It is meant to be the thing you come back to when the year has asked a great deal of you and the stove is still there, waiting, the way it always is.

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 45 minutes | Total Time: 1 hour | Servings: 4–6

Ingredients

3 1/2 lbs bone-in, skin-on chicken pieces (thighs, drumsticks, or a mix)
1 1/2 cups your favorite barbecue sauce, divided
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper (optional)

Instructions

Preheat and prep. Preheat your oven to 400°F. Line a large rimmed baking sheet with foil and set a wire rack on top. Pat the chicken pieces dry with paper towels.
Season the chicken. In a small bowl, combine the olive oil, smoked paprika, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, black pepper, and cayenne if using. Rub the mixture all over each piece of chicken, coating evenly under and over the skin.
Roast first, sauce second. Arrange the chicken skin-side up on the rack. Roast for 25 minutes, until the skin begins to set and the fat renders slightly. This step keeps the skin from going soggy once the sauce goes on.
Apply the barbecue sauce. Remove the pan from the oven. Using a brush or spoon, coat each piece generously with about half the barbecue sauce. Return to the oven and roast for 10 more minutes.
Glaze and finish. Brush on the remaining sauce and roast for a final 10 minutes, until the glaze is caramelized and slightly sticky and the internal temperature of the thickest piece reads 165°F on an instant-read thermometer.
Rest before serving. Let the chicken rest on the rack for 5 minutes before plating. This keeps the juices where they belong—inside the meat, not on the sheet pan.

Nutrition (per serving)

Barbecue Chicken — The Constant at the Center of a Circular Year