An imperial chef cooks with his feelings....

Darcy is a sprightly 105 kilos, and such mass was not accumulated overnight. He is pleased to say that he has found Turkish food and cooking to be more than adequate to maintain his dignified proportions. An amateur cook - with a miss ratio of only 30% - Darcy has tried his hand at a few Turkish dishes. One he likes in particular is that for a chicken and walnut combination known as Circassian Chicken. The original recipe is from the excellent The Art of Turkish Cooking by Neşet Eren, amended to reflect advice received from other Turks as well as Darcy's own tastes.

As an aside, it may be worth mentioning that Darcy's 30% miss ratio has much to do with the impossible directions that he encounters in cookbooks. "A pinch of salt" he almost understands. "A cup of water" he does not. What type of cup? Filled to the brim or not? Until such time as cookbooks start to give exact details - e.g. 123 millilitres (Darcy is also a firm believer in the metric system) - Darcy will continue to apportion all of the blame for recipes that go wrong to sloppy writers.

Alas, Turkish cookbook writers are no exception to the rule. Indeed, they even boast of it, deriving authority for misleading their readers from the great chefs of history (Unlike Carême or Escoffier, these remain unnamed.) To quote from Eren: "When the Empress Eugénie... was in Istanbul as a guest of Sultan Abdülaziz, she fell in love with eggplant purée... She asked her host if he would allow his chef to teach her[s]... The Sultan obliged. The next day the French chef requested an audience with the empress and begged to be excused from this impossible task. "I took my book and my scales to the Turkish chef," he said, "and he threw them out. 'An imperial chef,' he told me, 'cooks with his feelings, his eyes, his ears, his nose.' " Darcy too has feelings, sometimes mixed, when in the kitchen but the concept of cooking with his ears is so beyond him that he feels humbled before the great chefs who can cook that way.

Ingredients

1.4 kg chicken meat (mainly breast), deboned of course
2.2 litres water
200 gr shelled walnuts
200 gr shelled pecans
One slice of French bread cut 3.5 cm thick
1 large onion, cut into large chunks
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 carrot, scraped, trimmed and cut into chunks
1 stalk celery, cut into chunks
1.5 teaspoons paprika
2 sprigs parsley
2 bay leaves
3 tablespoons of walnut oil
2 teaspoons of salt
0.5 tsp of ground black pepper

Instructions

Place the chicken, carrot, celery, onion, parsley, bay leaves and half the salt and black pepper into a large pot with the water. Bring to a boil, skim the top, and then reduce the heat and simmer for 15 minutes. The chicken should now be just cooked. Transfer the chicken and stock to a large bowl and let it all cool gradually. Once cool, strain stock, and save. Shred the chicken into thin strips. Set aside.

To the stock, add the bread, with the crust taken off. Take out the bread, squeeze to let half the water out, and set aside.

In a food processor, grind walnuts and pecans very finely. Add the wet bread, the garlic, walnuts, a little stock and blend them together. Continue slowly to add stock to the mixture until it has the consistency of mayonnaise. If the paste is too thick, add water. If too thin, either cook with your ears or pray that the excess water evaporates. Add the rest of the salt and black pepper to the paste.

Mix half the paste with the shredded chicken. Place on a plate. Spread the rest of the paste over the chicken (as if icing.)

In a very small pan combine the walnut oil and the remaining paprika over a very low heat until the oil begins to redden. Turn off the heat, let the oil cool, then strain. Discard the paprika, reserve the oil.

Drizzle the chicken with the oil. Serve slightly below room temperature, but not cold. As it cools, the mixture will set further. It keeps well in the fridge, though the texture changes slighly. If you like it, Darcy takes credit. If you do not, then you must have misread the recipe.

Picture courtesy of yemekzevki.blogspot.com.