Entries are piling in for the Telegraph Morrisons Best British Recipes competition and my kitchen is busy with chopping and simmering, mixing and baking. Aworld away from fancy chefs’ creations, these are real recipes from home cooks. What’s not to love?
Some professional dishes have become domestic classics, however; updated and tweaked in the family kitchen. Take thesummer salad par excellence, Coronation Chicken, invented 57 years ago by Rosemary Hume (although the credit is generally taken by her colleague, the society florist Constance Spry) to serve at the Queen’s coronation banquet. A dish of cold poached chicken, bathed ina spice-scented mayonnaise, it elegantly nodded to the monarch’s role as colonial ruler while delivering a crowd-pleasing mild flavour.
Read the original recipe, interpreted by Rose Prince. Some would say that this is the only true recipe.
Delia avoids controversy by calling hers simply “Curried Chicken Salad”. It’s a clever take, with yogurt lightening the mayonnaise. She uses curry paste which, unlike curry powder, doesn’t need “cooking out” in a dry pan to get rid of the taste of raw spices. Alias or not, it’s still Coronation Chicken.
Nigella’s Golden Jubilee Chicken, meanwhile, is more Thai than Raj, spiked with lime juice and chilli instead of being soothingly bathed in sauce. But Gordon Ramsay sticks to the true path, just adding mango instead of apricot, which seems reasonable.
Spry and Hume themselves might well have opted for the more exotic fruit, had it been easier to find in the post-war austerity of the early Fifties.
My favourite recipe, modern and sassy but true to the original, came from reader Simon Scutt afew years ago. It takes a bit of effort, but it’s worth it for the result, a lusciously saffron-scented delight.
The genius here is the sauce made with the stock from the chicken bones, it squeezes every drop of flavour out of the bird.
Thestock sets lightly, so that when stirred into thecrème fraîche and mayonnaise it dissolves tomake a light, cooling, creamy emulsion. Fitfor a queen.
THE RECIPE Coronation Chicken
Serves 8-10
Serve it with a salad made up of white long grain and wild rice, accompanied by a spicy white wine or dry rosé.
2 free-range chickens
2 large oranges
2 bay leaves
2 cinnamon sticks
Olive oil
For the stock:
1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic
1 cup medium dry white wine
1 tsp fenugreek (optional)
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp curry powder (I prefer touse korma)
1 finely chopped, small, dried, red chilli pepper (not the seeds)
For the marinade:
½ tsp saffron threads
1 tsp ground turmeric
4fl oz/115ml milk
4fl oz/115ml white wine
1 tbsp finely chopped fresh coriander
2 tbsp finely chopped mangochutney
2 tbsp sultanas
2 tbsp finely chopped driedapricot
For the dressing:
2 tsp curry powder
1 tsp ground coriander
14fl oz/400ml crème fraîche
7fl oz/200ml mayonnaise
To serve:
Fresh coriander
Paprika
Salad leaves
- Preheat the oven to 200F/400C/gas mark 6.
- Quarter the oranges, crunch upeach bay leaf and cinnamon stick and stuff everything into the chickens, with a little salt and blackpepper.
- Brush the chickens with olive oil and sprinkle with more salt and pepper. Roast them for 20 minutes per lb/500g.
- Leave to cool, then strip the meat from the carcases, chop roughly into bite-sized pieces andput in a wide dish.
- Put the skin and bones into a saucepan along with the stock ingredients and cover with water. Bring to the boil and simmer gently for two hours.
- Strain the stock and skim off the fat. Reduce the stock down to about 1 pint/500ml. Leave to cool.
- Meanwhile, make the marinade. Heat the saffron and turmeric gently in a dry saucepan for a few seconds, then add the milk and bring to the boil.
- Stir in the wine, coriander, mango chutney, sultanas and apricots. Simmer gently for about10 minutes.
- Leave this mixture to cool too, then add it to the cool stock.
- Stir the stock/marinade mixture into the chicken. Cover and leave in the fridge overnight.
- Heat the curry powder and coriander in a dry pan until fragrant. Put the crème fraîche and mayonnaise in a bowl and stir in the spices. Fold the dressing into the chicken and marinade, which will have set to alight jelly.
- Bring to room temperature before serving piled on salad leaves and scattered with chopped coriander and paprika.
TOP TIPS
- Try not to serve the dish fridge cold. Let the meat come close to room temperature before folding in the dressing.
- Opt for a whole bird. Meat cooked on the bone, and especially leg and thigh meat, is more succulent and better tasting, even if it doesn’t slice into such perfectly even pieces as a boneless breast.
- Resist the temptation to add grapes, nuts, and all the dried fruit leftover from last Christmas. Less is more.
- Cook dry spices, by heating them in a frying pan until fragrant, before adding them to the sauce
- Register your recipes at telegraph.co.uk/bestbritishrecipes
Best British Recipes: Coronation Chicken
Total time: 3 hours
