Is near enough good enough?
- rosemary
- Apr 6
- 8 min read
"The specifics matter less than the technique. Just have a play."
Yotam Ottolenghi
As usual I forgot to take a photo of the finished dish I cooked last night for us and my son's family - Nigel Slater's Chicken with spices and cream from his book Real Fast Food. So all I can offer is this of the leftovers - cold from the fridge. You can't really see the chicken but I guess you get a general picture of the sauce. This was a particularly egregious error as I knew that I was going to write this post about it, along the lines of my title. So apologies.
As I wrote that, I remembered that his later book Eat is really an updated version of his first book Real Fast Food - with pictures. So I took it out to see whether there was a picture in there. But no - and no recipe either. Which is interesting, because most of the recipes from that first book are. Did he think it not worth repeating I wonder? I will come back to that. Anyway it means there is no official photograph so none of us who have tried this recipe really know what it's supposed to look like. The good old days. Ignorance is bliss and all that.
Today's 'research' has been interesting, beginning with Ottolenghi's newsletter which landed in my email this morning and which contained the quote at the top of the page which, you will come to see is apposite. Plus that was a coincidence, and as you know I see coincidences as a sort of sign from above - or somewhere.
The reason I chose the topic of the title was because I knew that, however, simple this recipe was I would be deviating at least a tiny bit for a number of reasons. So let me take you through the points in the recipe which I knew before I started would be different, and those, which, as I cooked, became different.
First of course I had to double it. The recipe was for four - we were going to be seven - although as it turned out only six as my younger granddaughter was doing her shift at Baker's Delight. Hence the leftovers.
His introduction to the recipe is mostly an apology of a kind - for the use of commercial curry powder:
"Nothing raises purist eyebrows quite like the mention of curry powder. I will say in its defence that I have eaten some delicious meals where the main dish was spiced with a commercially blended powder. I prefer to toast and grind my own spices, but when short of time I use a 'proprietary powder, then add a few spices of my own."
Which is a bit of a reversal to his usual 'purist' approach to cooking. Although he does add a bit of a food snob touch when he lists the curry powder with the proviso that it be "from a recently opened tin". So it was even more of a reversal that I only had curry powder that I had made myself - admittedly not toasted - and also not 'fresh' - but from a recipe from Julie Sahni.
4 chicken pieces, breasts or thighs. And although he doesn't say it here - with skin on. I know he meant there to be skin ( think he takes it for granted that there should be skin" because later in the recipe he says to "cook till the skin is golden." Well it's difficult these days to find chicken pieces with skin on, so I just had skinless breasts. But 4. I don't know if you have noticed but breasts seem to be getting bigger and bigger these days. One breast is usually enough for David and I, but I swear that of the breasts that I had one of them would have fed four people on its own. I cut the smaller breasts into four - still sizeable pieces - about the size of a drumstick.
1 tablespoon groundnut oil. I confess I did not notice 'groundnut' and used olive oil. Minor.
4 medium tomatoes. Have you seen the price of tomatoes at the moment? I had none, other than some very scrappy - and diseased at the bottom - tomatoes from the garden. So it was a small tin of tomatoes that was used. And now that I think about it, if I was doubling it should have been a large tin or 2 small ones. But then I would have had even more sauce. So a slight mathematical error as well as diverting from fresh tomatoes.
Juice of half a lemon. Always a bit vague isn't it? After all lemons come in all different sizes and juiciness. Currently I am using some of my neighbour's lemons, which at the moment are huge, very thick skinned and not very juicy - so I used one and a half of them.
100ml cream - well I just poured in as much as I felt was needed, which I suspect was not as much as he suggested. For in spite of cooking it all at a fairly high temperature there was a lot of sauce - confirmed by The Wednesday Chef - who I shall come to in a minute.
That's just the ingredients. Fortunately elsewhere, and repeatedly in his writings, Nigel, like many of his contemporaries is very encouraging of the concept of substitution - as Ottolenghi also confirmed in this morning's newsletter:
"As one reader pointedly asked after I suggested adding "just a bit" of harissa to a dressing: "Where exactly am I supposed to find harissa in rural Minnesota?" Fair point. Cook from where you are - geographically, seasonally, emotionally. Don’t feel obliged to stick to my suggestions. ... raid your cupboards and adapt your dinner to what you find. The artichoke salad becomes something else entirely with roasted peppers instead." Ottolenghi
What about that technique that Ottolenghi mentions. Did I follow Nigel's technique? More or less I think. You fry the chicken - which I had to do in two batches as there was not enough room in the pan. Add onions and garlic and cook until they are soft - add your curry powder and cinnamon, cook for a bit, then add your tomatoes and chicken stock and cook until done. the cream is added just before serving with the lemon juice. Simple.
Honestly I was marginally disappointed with the results. It was pretty ordinary - the kind of thing that virtually anyone might toss together with some chicken, onions, tomatoes and curry powder. The writer of the All of Real Fast Food website, whose version of Nigel's Chicken with spices and cream this is said:
"It’s not refined stuff. It’s only really half ‘curry from scratch’, in the terminology of take-away obsessed students, whispering to one another reverentially over the dining table of Their Mate Who Can Cook, ... This recipe seems to me to be Butter Chicken by another name" All of Real Fast Food
Which is interesting, because The Wednesday Chef noted:
"(Sneaky guy, see how he evades the whole concept of "chicken curry" entirely with that recipe title?)"
She doesn't however, because she calls her's
Nigel Slater's chicken curry and I have to say her picture is pretty much how mine looked. She used tinned tomatoes too, but otherwise pretty much stuck to Nigel's recipe, but did suggest that you could, if you so felt inclined add some peas and sprinkle some coriander on top. And the sauce?
"the recipe makes an enormous amount of sauce, but it is mind-bendingly delicious, all flecked with shreds of tomato and meltingly soft onions and it's silky with cream, but not heavy, if that's what you're wondering."
Which I think is a bit of an exaggeration. But I have just thought - oh the horror - that the ordinariness of my effort might be because of my curry powder! No - I suspect that the ordinariness feeling is very 2025. If I had made this back when this book was written - 1992 - or even earlier back in the 60s - I would have thought it amazing. Can there be such a thing as over-exposure to delicious, experimental and multicultural food?
Further 'research' turned up interesting examples of evolution. Vic's Recipes said that his version was adapted from both Nigel and The Wednesday Chef, and, accordingly he calls it Luisa's Raj curry - although actually he didn't stray much from the original - except for those tinned tomatoes. Well there's more flavour in them isn't there?
No - not quite right. He cooks the chicken in one pan and then adds it to another pan in which he has cooked the onions, etc. The main divergence however, looking at his picture is that I wonder what happened to the sauce. He does follow the recipe, so he should have a lot of sauce. Has he served it separately? Although the chicken pieces shown here have no evidence of having been cooked in any kind of sauce. Is this actually a picture of some other dish - or maybe it's just the chicken pieces after their initial frying. In fact I think that's it. There is another picture of the chicken on the onions before the addition of the liquids. Maybe, like me, he was too interested in eating the finished dish than photographing it.
Then we start to diverge a bit more from the original. Travel Gourmet calls it Very simple chicken curry. First of all he/she adds chickpeas and peas, but to be fair they had some unexpected guests and had to stretch it without having any more chicken. He/she diverges more than that however. First the onions, are fried. Then the chicken - cut in bite-sized pieces - is added and fried with the onions - the reverse order to Nigel, but the more usual order for a curry. Next come the spices, and then the rest. I also think he/she added even less cream than I. Nigel says 200ml, which, if I had doubled the amount for my double sized recipe would have been 400ml - that's almost a full large sized bottle of cream. I don't think I even added 200ml.
Last of all we have Creamy chicken curry from Me and Bert, Bert being the writer's baby who is shown with maybe some remnants on the tray of his high chair. But no picture of the finished dish. But then again Bert is obviously more important than the food. Indeed the only pictures that exist from last night's meal here are a few of my son carrying his beautiful 17 year old daughter, which are on David's phone, so I don't have any.
A small diversion. In today's offering on my Daily Italian Words website, in a list of the 15 most used words in the Italian language, the topmost was bellismo/a which means truly beautiful. But you knew that. The example they gave was sort of related to all of this:
"Your friend’s half-burned cake? Still bellissima! (it’s the effort that counts, right?)." Daily Italian Words
Back to Bert's mum and her "version of an absolutely delicious Nigel Slater recipe." She makes her own spice mix, and does things in a different order, uses yoghurt as well as crème fraïche and cooks the sauce down. It sounds rather good. Dare I say an improvement? And:
"Bert ate so much we’re worried we’ll wither away as he swells to giant proportions."
I've enjoyed writing this post, mostly because of those bloggers and their little communities who left mostly rave comments about the dish, the blogger, Nigel ... Like this one on The Wednesday Chef website:
"How could you NOT love a cookbook that gives you a recipe for a chip buttie? And advises you to use plasticky white bread for it?" Kate/Savour Fare
Indeed. My hesitation over super dish status, and my mingy 3* are almost certainly due to the increasingly exciting options there are out there - both in restaurants and cafés and cookbooks. Noor Murad - who wrote both of the OTK recipe books with Ottolenghi, has her own book - Lugma - out this week. I shall certainly be buying that. Just one more example of a truly exciting cooking world. Which makes Real Fast Food, Robert Carrier, Delia Smith, Elizabeth David et al. sound terribly old-fashioned and ordinary.
But don't forget them. There are gems in there - real gems. Like Nigel's Chicken Marsala - which is divine, and which I have written about before.
YEARS GONE BY
April 6
2024 - Nothing
2023 - Nothing
2021 - The shock of the new
2020 - Deleted
2019 - Sicilian sweet and sour
It was a delicious chicken curry and not knowing of its complex origins took not one tiny bit away from the success of the meal. The curry was eaten and much appreciated by six of us - all apart from one vegetarian grandaughter, who I thought was looking a little enviously at what the rest of us were eating!