She had been preparing it since five o'clock.
The chicken recipe of her mother was just a personal one. It had never been written down her mother wasn't the kind of person who would write down recipes, she was a person who worked by feeling, by reminiscences through senses, and by the special kind of intelligence of a person who believes food is a form of attention, a means of saying: "I am attending to you quite enough to make this properly". She got to know it through watching, then making mistakes twice, and after that, doing it right. The one she now had was the unchanged one, with the particular balance of the preserved lemon to olive to garlic that created the scent that only the people working hard can recognize.
She spatchcocked the chicken as her mother had taught her the backbo
