Juicy chicken roasted, flattened under a brick over an open fire. Pollo al Mattone. That's one of my favorite traveling food memories. About a dozen years ago, my family had stopped for lunch in a little garden trattoria off the Appian Way in Rome. We sat at a picnic table in the shade and waited while the chef prepared lunch. It was a luscious chicken, splayed out over the grill and crushed under the weight of a large brick. The bird looked like the unsuspecting pedestrian in a Loony Toon cartoon, after the safe fell out of an upper story window and squashed him on the sidewalk below. Except for the unfortunate visual, everything else about that Chicken Under a Brick was perfection. It was unbelievably juicy. The flavors were intensely herbal and salty. The aroma, the wine that washed it down, the friendly hosts...everything about that lunch has been tucked away as a most favorite travel thought.
While quarantining, hoping that COVID-19 will kill itself and go away, we figured we would attempt chicken under a brick. Maybe it would trigger wonderfully happy thoughts. At the very least, it would make for a tasty Keep-COVID-Away dinner. We had raw chicken in the fridge. We had time on our hands. We just didn't have a big brick. After scrounging around in the basement, we found a small fragment of a pathetic broken brick. And a cinderblock. Nothing that a layer of aluminum foil between the cinderblock and the chicken couldn't fix. So, we pressed the weights into service and roasted the chicken in the oven.
