Hunter’s chicken: the ultimate cheer-me-up-quickly recipe

Pub food in Britain has had a mixed reputation over the years. For a long time, the most a pub would have to offer as food would be some pork scratchings or a pickled egg. There certainly wasn’t a brigade of chefs in white coats in a shiny chrome kitchen.

This is midweek-teatime cooking, it’s sling-it-in-an-oven cooking, it’s cheer-me-up-quickly cooking

Pub grub started to appear in the 1970s, but it was simple, filling and predictable. It was the sort of unpretentious, low-priced food that was suitable for a worker’s lunch break. So up and down the country pub menus all hit the same beats: steak and kidney pie, ham with egg and chips, chilli con carne, fish and chips, even lasagne – and hunter’s chicken.

After decades of that sort of fare, pubs started to have more high-falutin’ ambitions and the gastropub arrived. The term was coined in 1991 when describing The Eagle in Clerkenwell, but it was used to refer to places where the food was deemed by someone to be of ‘restaurant quality’. It changed the way we thought about British food and pub food in one fell swoop. Pubs became a destination for food, and increasingly the bill was restaurant-sized, too. In 2001, the Stag Inn in Titley, Herefordshire, was the first pub to win a Michelin star.

By 2011, the gastropub had been declared dead by The Good Food Guide. What had once meant excellent food now became a catch-all term for expensive menus, a more general gentrification of pubs and the death of the local boozer.