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sauces. Then she’d take a few tablespoons of the stock she’d just made and use that to thin out the gravy. She’d hand me a slotted spoon and say, “OK, Marcus, get the lumps out.”
    Later that night, she’d serve the meal we’d created, always givingcredit to “my little helper.” No matter how many times we prepared the same dish the same way, I was always excited to see the meal I’d helped to make, presented formally on a silver serving tray: chicken roasted with rosemary, accompanied by carrots glazed with a little bit of honey, ginger, and sugar.
    The next day my mother, my father, my sisters, and I would often come back for chicken soup. She’d have taken all the meat that was left over from the Saturday night supper and added it to the stock along with a boiled pot of rice or potatoes. And that was the meal. It was so full of flavor because of her upbringing, the poverty that she came from. The preserving technique that made everything taste richer, deeper. The fresh chicken that she had hand-picked. Drying the bird, which gives you the perfect skin. The salting because she never trusted refrigerators, the two or three days’ worth of meals that she would create from one chicken because being poor makes you inventive.
    The roast chicken I make today is a homage to hers. I have luxuries that she didn’t. I use perfectly fed chickens, ones that weigh exactly three pounds. My grandmother bought whole chickens from the market, some fat and some skinny. I use real butter instead of grease fat. But the layering of flavor and the techniques? They’re all hers.

FIVE WITH RESPECT TO THE SEA
    E VERY SPRING WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, MY FATHER WOULD TAKE A TRIP to Smögen, the island off the west coast of Sweden where he’d been born and raised and where our family spent most of its vacations. Every Easter break, he drove there alone to prepare the summer house and the family’s fishing boats. I was twelve, just about to start middle school, when he invited me along for the first time.
    “This is not a holiday,” he warned. “We are going to get the boats ready. You can’t come along unless you’re willing to help.”
    During the summer, Smögen was flooded with tourists who came to see Sweden’s longest boardwalk and eat prawn sandwiches from brightly colored wooden huts which, from afar, looked like they weremade of Popsicle sticks. But this was not summer and we were not tourists. In March in Smögen, the salt air coated your skin and its gritty texture made you feel tougher, both inside and out. “Just us two men,” my father said, my father who had so longed for a son that he had flown paper planes—adoption forms in triplicate—all the way to Africa to make his dream come true.
    The road from Göteborg to Smögen was a patchy two-lane that veered between rugged shoreline, thick forests of pines and spruce, and meadows full of yarrow and twinflower. Sometimes there was no vegetation at all and the road cut through vast rock formations, endless fields of dark gray granite that looked, from the car window, like elephant hide. It took almost three hours to get there, and I measured our progress by the blue road signs showing how many kilometers were left to go: Smögen 13, Smögen 6, Smögen 2. We skirted the edge of Kungshamn, the last mainland town at the tip of the thumb-shaped peninsula, and crossed the Uddevalla Bridge. We were close, I knew, when I saw the first cluster of red-roofed houses, the docks, the bobbing boats, the small beach, and the steely water of the fjord that would eventually spill into the sea. And then I saw it, the first sign that we had arrived: a white two-story house with a red roof, set back from the road, with no other houses around. This was the house of my great-uncle Torsten, my father’s uncle and the closest thing I had to a paternal grandfather, since my father’s father had died more than twenty years earlier. Torsten’s house sat at the foot of the new bridge,