In the Kitchen with Patricia Wells

What would Wells prepare for someone she wanted to nourish? Roasted chicken, salad, toasted bread, a seasonal cheese, and sorbet. Megan Provost

Patricia said I would forget, and I did.

In her 2017 book, My Master Recipes: 165 Recipes to Inspire Confidence in the Kitchen, Patricia Wells MA’72 notes in her list of tips for roasting chicken that, according to legendary French chef Joël Robuchon, it’s best to salt and pepper the buttered bird after about 10 minutes in the oven, but that “most cooks would forget to do this!”

I am most cooks.

When I talked to Patricia last fall for “The Food Lover’s Guide to Living in Season,” I asked her what she might prepare for a friend or loved one — not someone she was trying to impress but someone she wanted to nourish. Her answer: roasted chicken, salad, toasted bread, a seasonal cheese, and sorbet. I turned to Wells’s recipes and philosophies to re-create the meal.

Forgetting the 10-minute trick was the least significant way in which my preparation departed from Wells’s. I procured sourdough starter too late to have a home-baked loaf ready for dinner and settled on store-bought. My new roasting rack didn’t fit into my pan, so my bird rested in the pan instead of being suspended above it. And when our neighbor stopped by with holiday treats, my partner’s dog bolted out the front door, and I gave chase in my stocking feet through Wisconsin’s first proper snow of the season.

None of this sullied the experience. Patricia Wells’s approach to cooking is not solely defined by the Provençal setting in which she honed it, but more by its tenets of seasonality and thoughtfulness. I purchased as many ingredients as I could from local producers. The salad was an apple, candied pecan, white cheddar, and spinach affair befitting winter in Wisconsin. The locally sourced chocolate-peppermint sorbet, admittedly more decadent than the fresh, fruit-forward creations of Wells’s repertoire, was still seasonally appropriate for December. And while I couldn’t get my hands on a bottle of Wells’s own Clos Chanteduc Côtes-du-Rhône, I wasn’t sorry to sip a Burgundy per her recommendation on another recipe.

When I sat down to share the meal with my partner, I truly felt at home with Patricia Wells (to borrow the name of her renowned cooking school). As a Midwest-reared writer and home cook who loves her people by feeding them, I found myself channeling Wells through easy conversation over carefully curated courses that said “here, sit, eat, enjoy” — the effortless translation of the love language of food. My dining companion and I left the table fully sated and in higher spirits than a winter weeknight usually inspires.

The naughty dog even got some chicken, too.

Published in the Spring 2025 issue