Throwback Thursday: Chicken and tomato casserole in milk

When your family dissolves into a single-mom scenario, and you’re in your mid to late teens, you try new tricks in the kitchen so that mom doesn’t have to cook every day when she gets home from her job behind the record counter at the CNA.

By the time we moved into the little rent-controlled cottage in Three Anchor Bay, in 1974, I was 18 and already fairly accomplished behind a stove. If cooking fillet steaks in the oven could be called accomplished. ? 

I remember cooking Duck l’Orange for one Christmas lunch, with no recipe to follow. I think I just tipped some orange juice into the sauce when deglazing and hoped for the best. This was for Christmas 1976, by which time I had left the army and found a job at The Cape Times. There was some pride in being able to contribute properly by then, even if I still had a world of things to learn about food and cooking. 

But the dish I remember making most often, starting circa 1974 before the apartheid state whisked me off to the army kicking and screaming, was a chicken casserole. In milk.

I know. Look, I was a teenager with an imagination. My mom never complained, maybe she was just being polite. Not just milk though: it was chicken portions and sliced tomatoes and onions, covered with milk, seasoned and cooked in the oven.

Looking back, I know I could have given it a lot more power. Other than the tomatoes and onion, I don’t think I added anything else other than salt and pepper. With hindsight being the wonderful thing that it is, I surely would have added at least thyme, and definitely garlic. And you could even have added rice directly to the casserole at some point, to absorb a lot of that milk. Of course, I never imagined that many decades later I would be writing about it, and all that has happened since.

Deciding to return to the old chicken and tomato casserole recipe, I took to Google, as one does, and lo and behold, who should also have a chicken in milk recipe but (drumroll please)… Jamie Oliver. Whether he first made it for his mum when he was a teenager we don’t know, but he turned out to be a pretty fair cook, so maybe I’m in good company.

His recipe is for chicken portions, cinnamon, thyme, lemon and masses of whole garlic cloves. No tomato. But plenty of milk there is.

Much more common online are recipes for chicken with another kind of milk: coconut milk. And that is the route I decided to take when deciding to (sort of) recreate that old casserole recipe. 

So, instead of dairy milk, we have a can of coconut cream. We have tomato and onions, as per the original 1970s dish, and we have garlic, and because of the coconut cream, we have coriander.

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