40-cloves-of-garlic chicken

If you need a reliable yet delicious one-pan crowd-pleaser to add to your repertoire, this Provençal-style staple is hard to beat - to match with a range of whites or rosé

- CLAIRE THOMSON

A popular ingredient, chicken is as much a grocery favourite for midweek, minimal-fuss dinners as it is for more indulgent, celebratory weekend cooking. Its versatility is very much its selling point. Stating the obvious, we should all be buying the best-quality chicken our budget allows for, with free range and/or organic chicken being the ideal. A responsibly sourced whole chicken will cost you, and as such I would urge you to be scrupulous in its demolition. After cooking a whole bird and eating your fill, strip the carcass, prising every single morsel from the frame, and use it in a recipe that makes the most of leftovers.

If you are buying chicken from a butcher, a good one should be happy to help with any of your butchering requirements – spatchcocking a whole bird, for example. If not, then as ever there are countless tutorials to show you how to do this online.

With One Pan Chicken, never in my 10 years of writing cookery books has my answer to the question ‘What are you working on at the moment?’ elicited such an enthusiastic response. It has even taken me by surprise. In summary of these conversations – and there have been plenty – people want to eat chicken, and they want to cook that chicken simply, in one pan.

THE RECIPE

Many food writers - from Richard Olney, Elizabeth David, Keith Floyd and Nigel Slater to Nigella Lawson, me and plenty more have given the recipe for 40-cloves-of-garlic chicken (thought to be Provençal in origin), but it's terrific and certainly deserves its place in this book, too.