Winner winner, chicken dinner: The Times
Who doesn’t love a chicken dinner, whether it be a classic roast, or as shown here cold weather defying winter stews.
Tony Turnbull has created some deliciously different takes on the basic principle of a stew for the Times to see us through the colder months.
The concept of the stew is steeped in culinary history and a basic, all encompassing description is “ A combination of solid food ingredients that have been cooked in liquid and served in the resultant gravy.”
Herodotus said that the Scythians (8th to 4th centuries BC) "put the flesh into an animal's paunch, mix water with it, and boil it like that over the bone fire. The bones burn very well, and the paunch easily contains all the meat once it has been stripped off. In this way an ox, or any other sacrificial beast, is ingeniously made to boil itself.
Amazonian tribes used the shells of turtles as vessels, boiling the entrails of the turtle and various other ingredients in them. Other cultures used the shells of large molluscs (clams etc.) to boil foods in. There is archaeological evidence of these practices going back 8,000 years or more.
Today, we think that Tony’s approach of using a prospector pan is more suited to 20th century living, and who knows if the remnants of a chicken dinner in a prospector pan will be unearthed by future archaeologists? We believe that our pans are made to last, so you never know.
