"The grapes will soften, relax and caramelise into the winey sauce at the bottom of the pan. The sweetness compliments the chicken, and by the end of it you’ll be wanting to mop up the pan juices with a loaf of crusty bread." Romy Ash/The Guardian
I'm lucky dipping with the guru who, I am pretty sure, has never let me down. Every recipe I tried from his books worked and some are now household favourites. And here is the man himself (Robert Carrier in case you didn't read the title of the post), looking gloriously 1960s over the top glamorous. Glitzy. The silver shines, the flowers are somewhat too much and the serviettes are beautifully rolled. Carrier himself is impeccably dressed and jaunty almost. So very unlike the gurus of today. Even the top chefs of the world do not dress like this today. It was a different world back then and this is probably the time when he had stepped into the limelight and was at his peak - although the peak continued for many years to come.
The photograph comes from the back of the lucky dip book - Great Main Dishes - one in a series of slim paperback books which probably gleaned recipes from here and there in his books. He was a bit into reproducing the same recipes in different books.
As I said in yesterday's post, sometimes I am not enthralled by my lucky dips and I confess that when I opened this book at a page which began with Roast chicken with stuffing I cried inside. I know I have written about roast chicken before, and even though he gave a couple of stuffing options - French or Moroccan - his two favourite cuisines - I was not inspired. On the facing page? Poulet sauté 'Quaglino's' - Quaglino's being a posh restaurant in London and the recipe being pretty basic I finally opted for Chicken stuffed with grapes, hoping that I would find some interesting evolutionary options. I guess I could have rambled around Quaglino's - but who is really interested in a restaurant in London? It's still there by the way.
Maybe I should have opted for the Moroccan stuffing, but I finally decided on the grapes because in the new Coles Magazine there was this BBQ chicken, grape, pistachio and couscous salad - not at all the same dish but chicken and grapes and even with a Moroccan touch with the couscous. It prodded me to look again at my lucky dip.
So here I go and I suspect that this will be a somewhat amorphous post because chicken and grapes are a very common pairing. Why? I've tried to find an answer but really haven't come up with anything other than the grapes add a sweetness to the dish. Which isn't a very good answer is it? I will say however, that most of the recipes I found used red grapes - as opposed to 'the more acidic' green ones. And there were quite a few who lauded muscatel and fragola grapes as well - which are more difficult to find. Interestingly Robert Carrier went for green - as in the classic Poulet Véronique, which I'm pretty sure I have written about before.
Somebody connected the sweetness idea to the Chinese, although I could not find a well-known dish that paired the two. What I did find, however, when I was looking for a painting of chicken and grapes, was a lot of Chinese paintings of cockerels and grapes - of which this is one example. One doesn't think of the Chinese using grapes at all does one? Although these days they make wine, grapes are not often associated with Chinese food. I did see one recipe for chicken and grapes in a Chinese way, but the author said that it was sort of a poor man's version of Peking duck. No duck and plums available, so substitute chicken and grapes.
Jamie Oliver in his book 5 ingredients has a recipe he calls Sweet chicken surprise which although not at all Chinese - no Chinese spices or sauces - just red vermouth - the sweetness nevertheless is sort of Chinese. An admirer of Jamie - the writer of the blog Cooking from Books, copies his recipe with slight adaptations, calling it Chicken with garlic, grapes and red vermouth. Same recipe - she really didn't tweak it a lot - but a different look.
The source recipe, is one of the few recipes in Robert Carrier's book which is illustrated, but you would have to wonder at it. The chicken looks somewhat unnaturally glazed - it's just roasted with butter and salt, and basted with 'a little white wine from time to time'. There is not a grape to be seen. It looks dated, but I cannot really put my finger on why. Why would you not put the grapes in the picture? The whole reason for the recipe is the grapes. Here it just looks like a slightly unnatural roast chicken.
The stuffing, of course, is the thing, and it consists, of onion, garlic, butter, bread, parsley, sage, salt and pepper and those grapes. You don't appear to do anything to the grapes, just mix them in with everything else. There is no sauce. A pretty simple recipe in fact, which may well taste absolutely delicious. So perhaps I should give it a go when the grapes begin to appear.
Indeed one Letitia Ann Clark in her introduction to her recipe for Chicken with grapes said:
"simple roast chicken over potatoes is one of my favourite dishes, and almost nothing can beat it, and sometimes I feel all this experimenting is futile when we all know the very best way to eat a chicken is this way, with the sticky chicken caramel which collects at the edges of the roasting dish."
So maybe we should just abandon any extra things we might do and stick with simply roasting a chicken, maybe not even stuffed with grapes.
She did go further though - by adding fennel to the mix, as did Ottolenghi, although his chicken was grilled and the final dish was a salad - Grilled chicken with muscat grapes and fennel. Two dishes with the same ingredients and very different approaches. And just because Ottolenghi's is a salad - he has another salad too - Chicken, grape and za'atar salad
Did anybody else stuff the chicken with grapes? Of course they did, although sometimes they were just stuffing chicken breasts, which sometimes were roasted, sometimes braised. Other things were added to the stuffing, from pears to cheese. A few examples: Stuffed chicken breasts with grapes, hazelnuts and parmesan - Elizabeth Passarella/Kitchn; Roast chicken with grapes - Simply Recipes; Roasted pear and grape stuffed chicken - Fairy Gut Mother
The rest of the recipes I present here are virtually all braised which makes sense. The grapes vary in type and when they are added, and also with the liquid that is added: Braised chicken with grapes, wine and vinegar - Rachel Roddy; Winemaker's chicken - David Lebovitz; two from Nigel Slater - Chicken with grapes, cider and cream and Chicken escalopes with bacon and grapes; Roast chicken and grapes with pine nuts and radicchio - Julie Busutti Nishimura.
In virtually all of the recipes above, the grapes are left whole, and added during the cooking process collapsing in the process. But I did glimpse other recipes in which the grapes were roasted separately until just wrinkled and then added as a sort of garnish at the end. Somebody - Ottolenghi? sliced them and blended them with other things. Very occasionally somebody peeled them - which I did once, long, long ago for a Robert Carrier tart recipe - never again. It was one of the most tedious things I have ever done in the kitchen. Besides those skins - unless really, really tough, will add flavour and texture to your finished dish. What about the seeds? Opinion was divided with some thinking that they added yet more flavour and also crunch - we love crunch these days don't we? - and some saying to remove them. Another tedious task but these days I think, most of the grapes we buy are seedless. Doubtless somebody will come up with the idea of crushing them and scattering over the top.
It's not yet the season for grapes, although a few are appearing in the supermarkets that are not from overseas. Pretty soon - if summer ever comes - there will be grapes galore, so play around with chicken and grapes yourselves and if you are fed up with chicken, try pork as many of the cooks I came across today, suggested.
On opening my page to a series of mildly uninspiring dishes, I almost chickened out (pardon the pun) and tried another page. In fact I did and found something equally unappealing - I can't remember what now. Maybe it was fate punishing me for being a coward. Should I have tackled Quaglino's or Moroccan stuffing? Maybe, but actually in the end the choice I made showed me that with just two ingredients - chicken and grapes there is a whole world of possibilities to be explored. Most of those recipes above have little more than the chicken and grapes added to them. Maybe I should just try the straight stuffed whole chicken option. Or will that disprove my belief that Robert Carrier never fails?
"sweet, savoury, autumnal and delicious." Letitia Ann Clark
Like I said - wrong season really.
POSTSCRIPT
October 7
2020 - A time of innovation
2019 - Gözleme
2018 - Nothing
2017 - Nothing
2016 - An oldie but a goodie - chocolate mousse
Comments