Hello, welcome to Sunday Sauce, a weekly recipe newsletter designed to inspire your Sundays in the kitchen. This week’s newsletter contains a recipe for slow-roast chicken with a sweetcorn fricassee.
There is no such thing as a hangover cure, though a morning in the kitchen comes close.
On Saturday we’d headed to a friend’s 40th, an all-day (and if it weren’t for babysitters, all-night) affair into which we’d leant in fulsome fashion. Nothing was left on the pitch. My limited contribution to the event was about two litres of taramasalata and a possibly over-exuberant performance on the dance floor shortly before the taxi showed up. A very good lunch was served by the team from Tasca Frango in York. I caught up with friends I hadn’t seen in over two decades, and took care to avoid the pitchers of margaritas winking from the bar.
Not that it did me much good. So as a remedy I resolved to spend the morning cooking, beginning by pulling odds and ends from the fridge and, Ready Steady Cookishly figuring out what to do with them.
If some recipes are developed to within an inch of their lives, tested and retested and tested again, others are a little more loosey-goosey. I’ve never been the kind of cook who wants to get too granular on recipe development. Life is too short, tastes are too subjective, and frankly, for me at least, cooking becomes boring once it’s overthought. I’d rather tell you what I cooked and how I cooked it and then suggest tweaks, if any should present themselves.
There was a vast chicken to work around. A local couple have reared a brood on and off for the past decade and they remain the best tasting birds I’ve ever had - deeply flavoured and incredibly gamey. And allowed to develop to such an age that by the time I’d defrosted this would-be poularde she weighed just over 3kg.
As with a turkey, a bird of this size requires a little TLC in order to avoid overcooking the breast while getting the legs à point, and I thought slow-cooking the thing might be the move. It also gave me more time to get everything else prepared (I was moving fairly slowly), and have a restorative glass of Perry and a crisp or two. You can’t rush things on a Sunday such as this.
Slow-roasted chicken & sweetcorn fricassee
Chicken and sweetcorn were made for each other and so I make no apology for giving you the second sweetcorn recipe in as many weeks.
Roasting the chicken on a trivet of bread crusts is always a sensational move that gives you options. I think next time I might make a bread sauce from the chicken-infused crusts - they take on the flavour of the bay leaves in a particularly powerful way which suits a bread sauce. For now they went in with the sweetcorn.
Serves 6
a large chicken - 2kg fine, it doesn’t need to be a monster
a big bunch of herbs - I used parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
a little softened butter
a good handful of stale sourdough crusts (mine were left from the aforementioned taramasalata)
a handful of garlic cloves
a few bay leaves
100ml chicken stock or water
100ml white wine or dry vermouth (or dry sherry)
salt and pepper
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4 ears of corn
2 tbsp olive oil
2 shallots, peeled and roughly chopped
4 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
2 sticks of celery, sliced
salt
1 tsp coriander seeds
1/2 tsp chilli flakes
a handful of the roast chicken croutons, roughly chopped
a handful of sliced radishes
a squeeze of lemon
2 tbsp chopped dill - or, if you prefer, coriander
preheat the oven to 150C. Stuff the herbs in the chicken’s cavity. Rub it all over with butter then season with salt and pepper.
arrange the bread crusts, garlic and bay in a roasting tray and sit the chicken on top. Add the stock and wine. Cover with a layer of baking parchment, then a layer of foil.
cook for an hour. Remove the foil and cook for a further hour.
meanwhile, get on with the corn. As with last week’s recipe, slice the kernels from the corn cobs and set aside. Heat the oil in a large pan or wok and add the shallots, garlic and celery. Season with salt. Fry gently, stirring occasionally, until the shallot is soft but the celery still has some crunch to it. Probably 10 minutes. Add the coriander seeds and chilli flakes and fry for a minute or two, then up the temperature and add the sweetcorn. Cook, stirring near-constantly, until the sweetcorn is soft and lightly coloured.
toss in the croutons, radish and lemon and keep warm. You can always leave it to cool then give it a hard fry shortly before eating. Or serve at room temperature. Finish with dill when ready to serve.
to finish off the chicken, remove it to a separate tray, and give it a 15 minute blast at 200C to crisp up the skin. Strain the cooking juices from the first pan into a saucepan and simmer. Have a taste and adjust with salt if necessary. You may want to add a little more stock.
rest the chicken for 15 minutes before carving. Serve with the sweetcorn business and generous spoonfuls of pan juices. We had some boiled new potatoes and cavolo nero alongside and felt good as new.