Cooks Illustrated - The Best Slow and Easy Recipes

Twenty years ago, my wife and I purchased an AGA stove for our farmhouse. It was the large four-oven model and we had to have the kitchen floor reinforced to handle 1200 pounds of cast iron. I quickly learned that the AGA is not about stovetop cooking since the two burners lose heat fairly quickly, as does the entire stovetop if the insulating covers are left up for more than 10 or 15 minutes. This is a stove that is designed for long, slow cooking, and once I adjusted to that notion, a whole new world of cookery was revealed. I loved two things about it. First, the oven does most of the work. You can get things going and then just walk away. Second, the food tastes better when cooked low and slow. Over time, I have come to describe this form of culinary endeavor as slow and easy cooking.

When I was a kid in Vermont, there were a lot of things that were interminably slow. To make a phone call, you had to crank up the phone and then the call was connected through an operator on a party line. This meant, of course, that she knew everything about everybody. Our ice cream maker was also hand-cranked, which required a half-hour of my sister Kate and me sitting on the floor churning fresh peach ice cream. Floyd Bentley always mowed hay with his team, walking steadily, almost lazily, around the huge bottom fields by the Green River. (The only time they picked up the pace was when he mowed over a yellow-jacket nest.) And I spent thousands of hours in the front parlor of the yellow farmhouse (the center of our towns farming and cooking activity) with farmers who might go a full five minutes without saying anything at all. Everything else was just as slow. Country people never run or even walk quickly, not even when a thunderstorm is moving in. Cows are slower than slow as are rainy afternoons, the lazy wet dog asleep underneath the Kalamazoo wood stove in winter, and the wait for the maple syrup to sheet off the skimmer.

These days I remember slow times with great affection. Slow and easy is no longer a term of derision, as in slow traffic or slow service. If you visit Calvin Coolidges homestead in Plymouth Gap you can see the front parlor where the 30th President of The United States took the oath of office, the church he attended (right across the street), his fathers general store (just down the road), and the huge two-level barn. You can stand there and drink in slow and easy until time stops, you exhale a long, slow breath, and the world seems just a wee bit simpler and better.

In the kitchen, slow and easy seems to me the ideal way to cook. Let me give you an example. Take a seasoned browned chicken, throw it in a pot, add a small onion, a few cloves of garlic, a bay leaf, and some fresh thyme. Cover and roast at 250 degrees for about an hour and a half until done. The chicken creates its own jus, which is rich in flavor since it has not been adulterated with stocks or other liquids. It is simple, delicious, easy. And we have adapted this approach for fish, beef, pork, turkey, even eggs.

The premise is time-tested. Let slow cooking do the work and enhance the flavor. We oven-roast, we oven-braise, we use a slow cooker, and we turn stovetop recipes into oven recipes (braises are much better in the oven since the pot heats evenlyon the stovetop, the bottom is hotter than the sides, which often results in burning or overcooking). We even investigate slow-cooking vegetables and fruits and have come up with some fresh approaches including slow-braised carrots and pan-roasted peaches.