Coronation chicken!

We were having a little WordPress chat, a friend and I, and coronation chicken came up in the conversation. What a blast from the past. After we’d spoken of it I realised I wasn’t sure exactly what it was… cold chicken with curried mayonnaise, or am I muddling it with something else. I looked through my old cookery books – some f them had been my mum and my aunties’, but I couldn’t find a single recipe for what I thought was a classic if much-mocked British dish!

I had to resort to the internet, me with my hundreds of cookery books! There are obviously lots of recipes for everything to be found in hyperspace but I glanced at the BBC Food page… what? It has twenty ingredients!! Really? Then I saw another BBC recipe for instant coronation chicken which had a mere 7 ingredients.

Apparently Constance Spry, the cookery writer, invented the dish for the Queen’s coronation; these are the ingredients for her chicken:

• 1 tbsp oil
• 50g/2oz onion, finely chopped
• 1 dessert spoon curry powder
• 1 good tsp tomato purée
• 1 wineglass red wine
• ¾ wineglass water
• A bay leaf
• Salt, sugar, a touch of pepper
• A slice or two of lemon and a squeeze of lemon juice
• 1-2 tbsp apricot purée 450ml/¾ pint mayonnaise
• 2-3 tbsp lightly whipped cream

It’s quite simple, fry the onion with the curry powder, cook the purée, wine, water, bay leaf, mix with the mayo when cold, combine everything… and there you are.

However… the story may not be as simple as that; apparently there is a breed of chicken called Coronation Sussex, which were first bred for Edward VIII’s coronation; as he was never crowned, they were then used for George VI’s coronation. (There was also the Jubilee chickens, bred for George V’s jubilee in 1937 – were they cooked and eaten with curried mayonnaise?) Rumour has it that the original dish was prepared for an earlier king, portly Edward VII, Victoria’s son who reigned from 1902-1910.