Chicken, saffron, almonds - a Spanish lucky dip

Jun 24, 2024

"I felt a little dubious about the combination of ingredients before testing it, the red wine gives a rich colour and flavour, the chicken reheats beautifully" Beverley Sutherland Smith

Note the reference to the red wine because I have now roamed the net looking for recipes for this classic Spanish dish Pollo (or more correctly Gallina) in pepitoria, and have found not a single one that used red wine - sherry sometimes but mostly white wine.

The version shown here incidentally is one of the prettier ones I found and is called Spanish chicken with almonds and saffron from the Food Love Collective.

David's randomly picked cookbook was this one - The Best of Beverley Sutherland Smith which is a collection of her columns in The Age. I confess I cheated a bit when it came to randomly picking a page, because I alighted on Christmas gifts and Nut crescents. Well we are a long way from Christmas although the weather here at the moment is rather Southern England Christmas wintry; and besides I was not really fascinated by the idea of Nut crescents. So I cheated and picked another page which turned up three Spanish recipes, the first of which was Gallina en pepitoria. The difference between gallina and pollo, by the way is that gallina is an older hen - which you never see these days - just very large chickens.

In fact it was interesting that of the three recipes she included in this particular article, - a chicken dish, a sweet kind of French toast and Sangria, none were for fish, although most of her introduction was taken up with rhapsodising about the local fish. Anyway I decided on the chicken as my lucky dip dish.

Taste Atlas tells us:

"The hen or chicken is cut into pieces, dusted with flour, then fried until golden brown. The sauce is made with garlic, onions, serrano ham, sherry or white wine, chicken stock, almonds, saffron, parsley, and crushed hard-boiled egg yolks."

And I have to say that the vast majority of the recipes I found were more or less as above. I did find one blogger - We Are Never Full - who found that what she had thought were almonds turned out to be hazelnuts, and so she improvised:

"What I can tell you is substituting hazelnuts in this dish for almonds does not actually change the flavor all that much. But the thing that I really decided to do [which was] completely different from the traditional dish was to actually coat the pieces of chicken in hazelnuts and lightly saute them until crispy on the outside and finished them in the oven to keep it moist inside. You all like it moist, right? But, dear readers, you must know that traditionally you would just roll pieces of chicken with the bone in, in some seasoned flour and sauté them just like that in olive oil."

Beverley not only uses red wine, but she also includes mushrooms - I did not see anybody use mushrooms - and did not use the hard-boiled egg yolks or the ham. Which sort of puts her in the 'Hate' basket according to the comments on 'authenticity' from We Are Never Full:

"do I have a right to really call this dish Pollo en Pepitoria? Probably not. Do I hate when idiots like Rachael Ray and Sandra Lee completely remake an authentic classic and continue calling it by it’s authentic name but it doesn’t even resemble the original dish? YES. Am I being a bit of a hypocrite right now – uh-huh. Do I care? Not really.... So here’s Pollo en Pepitoria “Kinda”"

Judging from Beverley's introduction, however, I'm guessing that she did actually get her recipe from a local in the tourist town of Torremolinos, which sort of demonstrates that these 'classic' dishes are just a basic idea that gets changed from cook to cook and probably from day to day. I mean if you get a recipe for a classis Spanish dish from a Spaniard, then surely it's" authentic' or at least could be assumed to be 'authentic'? Well that's a real can of worms in itself.

At first I thought - just from the ingredients - that this was a fairly ordinary kind of recipe, but when I checked out the recipe in full I decided, that, no, it might actually a good one to try some time soon - although, for me, the main question will be red or white wine? Also maybe the mushrooms are a bit intriguing. Anyway here is what I found - some with the traditional name, some not, and you would have to wonder why some went one way and some the other in that respect: Chicken with almond-garlic saffron sauce/Seasoned to Taste - this was the first to come up even though it was an unknown blog although in the process of presenting the recipe the writer said it was based on Chicken in garlic-almond sauce from Mary-Frances Heck/Bon Appétit. Spanish almond chicken with saffron-wine sauce/Saveur which is a sort of compromise in the naming stakes; Pollo en pepitoria - Diana Henry/ BBC Good Food; Saffron-braised chicken with pounded almond and garlic sauce - Gourmet Traveller and Pollo en pepitoria from Frank Camorra in the Sydney Morning Herald - well he does own Movida possibly our top Spanish restaurant so he's allowed to use the 'classic' name.

One last word - on the whole this is a dish that the photographers seemed to find difficult to photograph, with just a few looking truly tempting. You would have thought that the saffron would have made them rather more golden looking. Not that this means they are not delicious of course. Delicious does not necessarily mean beautiful to look at.

In my efforts at finding exciting variations I actually found none really. Indeed my original Beverly Sutherland Smith recipe was in many ways the most radical of them all. So I had a quick look at that combination of ingredients - almonds and saffron to see what that came up with. No surprise that the majority were from Spain, Morocco and the Middle-East, all of which are either Arabic strongholds or once were. And I have to say that rice was often a partner. My finds?: Grilled Norfolk asparagus, almonds, saffron and wild chervil from Tom Oldroyd on the Meat-free Mondays website - which along with Saffron roast potatoes with garlic, lemon thyme and flaked almonds from Dovebrook, were the most unexpected experiments. Then it's rice and one pasta: Saffron and chickpea pasta from Maggie Hennessy/Salon; Saffron rice with sour cherries, roasted almonds, caramelized onions & fresh parsley/Eden Eats; Biryani with saffron and golden veg/Anna Jones; Lamb pilaf with sweet almonds and sour plum dressing/Ottolenghi - yes I knew he would have something.