Whose chicken is King of the Kievs?
FOR a dish invented by a French chef to grace the dinner table of a Russian tsar in the early 1800s, chicken kiev has a singular place in British history. A 1970s staple, the breadcrumbed chicken with its hidden geyser of garlicky butter was supposed to have been consigned to food history by the nouvelle cuisine of the 1980s.
Yet today it’s enjoying a posh-nosh revival on trendy restaurant menus across the country, while star chefs including TV favourites Jamie Oliver, Tom Kerridge and James Martin have all made space for it in recent recipe books.
And it has never gone out of fashion in British homes. Britain’s first chilled ready meal, launched by Marks & Spencer in 1979, chicken kiev has such enduring appeal it’s been in the notional basket of food shopping with which the Office for National Statistics judges the UK’s consumer price indices since 2006. Last year, in a Good Food Nation Survey, it came second only to trifle on the country’s list of favourite retro foods, a statistic reinforced by its continued presence in every supermarket.
So while the history of chicken kiev may be a turbulent one – the contents and cooking of the classic dish were squabbled over for decades by the Russians, Ukrainians and French – its future here seems set fair.