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How to cook the perfect chicken with 40 cloves of garlic – recipe | Felicity Cloake
Our resident perfectionist takes on the classic French dish of garlic-flavoured chicken in garlic sauce, which is nowhere near as garlicky as you might imagine
Flicking through my parents’ copy of Nigel Slater’s Real Food as an impressionable teenager, one impossibly daring recipe leapt out: chicken with 40 cloves of garlic may have already been a bit old hat in Nigella Lawson’s childhood, but in the provinces, such a quantity still seemed, as Lawson notes, “somehow dangerously excessive”. An older colleague at my first summer job always wrinkled her nose if I’d as much as sniffed a clove the night before, so 40 would probably have moved her to tears. (Unsurprisingly, I never plucked up the courage to test her.)
The idea is often described as Provençal, though Elizabeth David makes reference to similar dishes from both the Dauphiné, slightly farther north, and the Béarn, in the south-west of France, so, in the absence of firm evidence to the contrary, it seems more than likely that chicken was prepared with large amounts of garlic wherever large quantities of garlic were grown. The elevation of that bulb to star turn seems to have occurred in the US, where in 1954 James Beard published the first recipe calling for the now sacrosanct 40 cloves – which, as Betty Trussell points out, was at that point tantamount to joining the Communist party – and sparked far more than 40 imitations. It pops up in Gourmet magazine, the New York Times and the Silver Palate Cookbook before crossing the Atlantic to find favour with the Galloping Gourmet, Graham Kerr, and Keith Floyd, to name just two. Almost everyone has their own take, and I’m sure they’re all delicious, but who does it best?