Recipe: Chicken Marbella

What is it about retro food? I don’t mean nostalgic food, from school dinner favourites to your grandmother’s signature dishes. I mean food you’ve probably never even tried. Thoroughly old-fashioned dishes that nevertheless light up your culinary imagination — or at least mine. I’m talking devilled eggs. Prawn cocktail. Beef stroganoff.

Perhaps it’s because many of these recipes hail from the golden age of dinner parties. They speak of glamour, excess, a touch of kitsch, all washed down with a snowball. These are dishes that should be accompanied by shoulder pads and strong opinions about the royal wedding. Following a long period in which it was illegal to hold a dinner party, I crave retro food more than ever.

These dishes were popular for two reasons. One, they were easy to make. Two, they tasted good. My pick of the lot is chicken Marbella: an American dinner party dish much neglected here. Pieces of chicken are nestled alongside fat olives and briney capers, sweet, juicy prunes and wine, vinegar, lots of garlic, oregano, olive oil and sugar. The whole thing is roasted until the chicken skin is burnished and crisp, the prunes slightly caramelised, the olives squishy, and everything else has thickened just enough to form a spoonable sauce. The result is outrageously flavoursome: garlicky, winey, a balance of sweet, sour, and salty, all bathed in chicken juices.

Like all good dinner party dishes, chicken Marbella can be prepared in advance and bunged in the oven while you attend to the devilled eggs. It is, in essence, a tray bake. The chicken is marinated overnight before being tipped into a pan with white wine and a sprinkling of sugar, then baked for under an hour. It is also a good weeknight supper.

So, why Marbella? Good question. Unlike our holidaying Prime Minister, chicken Marbella has little for which to thank the Costa del Sol, originating as it did on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.