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LIVING & TRAVEL by steve mencher Published May 8, 1996

It's a great recipe, but it wasn't worth the pain. We'd had Pollo al Prosciutto once before, and I knew I could cook it. The chicken is cut up, smeared with herbed butter, wrapped in prosciutto and sealed in foil. The pieces stew in their rosemary- and marjoram-scented juices for almost two hours in the oven. As the meat falls off the bone into your mouth it tastes like Italy. On this particular occasion, everything went wrong. Rosanne exploded when I told her that one ingredient in this recipe -- the damn prosciutto -- cost more than twenty bucks. She had done the shopping the first time we made the dish, and spent a lot less. When I told her what I'd spent, she reacted as if I had taken the mortgage money to Atlantic City and lost it at the roulette table. Our fight destroyed my equilibrium and left a bitter taste in my mouth. The taste was still there days later when I cooked the cursed dish for her sister's family in Baltimore, and dried the thing out to near inedibility. Be warned: if the foil isn't sealed, the chicken turns mean and stringy. We sat down and talked about it one day. Not the chicken so much as the general subject. If we looked back, however reluctantly, at our four or five worst fights -- the really bad ones, when you wonder what it will be like to spend the rest of your life alone -- every single one of them was about food. Steve Mencher is a former producer for National Public Radio, and a charter member of the Acme Content Providers of Washington, D.C.