Chicken with lime and coriander

When I first started cooking Asian food, one of the things I used to make was a chicken dish with lemon and coriander from a BBC book by Madhur Jaffrey. Later, for Iranian guests, I sort-of 'persianised' the recipe, and served it with rice made the Persian way, with a golden crust. This is the result.

If possible, start the morning before a dinner, or the day before a lunch.

For four people with an appetite, you need eight chicken pieces. As I said before, I usually buy what the French call the 'haut de cuisse', the thigh without the drumstick. If they're from the supermarket, you may need to trim off some 'make-weight' fat and skin tucked underneath the pieces. Set them to brown in hot oil, first one side, then the other. Personally, to avoid getting oil and chicken fat all over the kitchen, I do this with a lid on and, having done one side, switch the heat off for a while to let the spitting die down before turning the pieces over and switching back on again to do the other.

While the browning goes on, peel all the cloves of a good head of garlic and a big piece of ginger, two if necessary. Cut them into chucks and put them in the bowl of the food processor. Add a cup of water, two heaped teaspoons of turmeric, one each of ground coriander and cumin, and a good pinch of saffron. I sometimes pound a dozen or so cardamom pods as well, and add the seeds. Process all this to a paste.

Remove the well-browned chicken pieces from the pan and leave them on a plate. Heat up the oil and juices in the pan and add the paste from the food processor. Let it cook for a while on a medium heat. With scissors, cut in a whole bunch of coriander. two if the bunches are small. Place the chicken pieces in the paste skin-side down, along with any juices that had run off on to the plate, and leave them there for a few minutes so the colour and flavours can start to sink in.

Juice two or three limes,  more if they are small or not very juicy. Add the juice to the pan and stir it into the paste. Pierce two or three dried limes and add those. Finally, salt. Put a lid on and cook for half an hour.

(For the record, I've usually found lime juice turns out better than lemon in this dish. I think it's probably because 'supermarket lemons' can make a slightly bitter sauce.)

I say only half an hour, because I do all this in advance, sometimes even the day before, then leave it to macerate. This is the stage I took the photo at; you can see that the sauce isn't well blended yet, and the dried limes are still firm. Later, I'll cook it another half hour or 45 minutes; then heat it up again before serving, while I get the rice ready. Perhaps I should note, here, that you shouldn't expect a great deal of sauce; little more than enough to coat the chicken.

As I said, I serve this with rice done the Persian way, with a golden crust at the bottom that, when you turn it out, becomes a crust on the top. Iranian guests fight over it. Plain white rice is fine, I think. There's enough spice and lime in the stew; the rice doesn't need any saffron, barberries, pistachios or whatever.

Having said that, my guests yesterday had it with smoked rice, as that was all I had enough of in stock.

I reckon that, once this dish is done, if you took the chicken off the bone you could actually finish it in the rice, in the style of a 'polo' or 'tahchin'. In these, the stew is layered in the rice pot and the whole dish is turned out of the saucepan at the end with the crust on top. But I haven't tried that yet.