Coronation Chicken

Coronation Chicken is a prepared chicken dish served cold consisting of poached chicken in a sauce of mayonnaise, cream, tomato paste, lemon juice, red wine, apricot pieces and curry spices.

It is bright yellow from the curry powder. Using prepared curry powder is more authentic than making up your own curry powder, as that's what would have been available when the recipe was created (see history.)

In place of the apricots, you can use apricot preserves, apricot jam, or chutney. Gordon Brown opts for mango. Many more elaborate versions have emerged over the years, adding almonds raisins and even continentalizing it by using crème fraîche and aïoli.

It is very popular as a sandwich filler, though it is somewhat out of fashion now. You can buy tubs of Coronation Chicken already made up at supermarkets to be used as a filling in sandwiches. Grocery stores even sell their own brands of it. It was so popular as a sandwich filler that at one point, even the upscale sandwich chain "Pret A Manger " offered it up until about 2005.

For decades, Coronation Chicken was a popular British summer salad. Best served room temperature, rather than completely cold from the fridge.
Coronation Chicken was created specially for Queen Elizabeth II's coronation lunch in 1953. The Minister of Works approved the recipe, put forward by Constance Spry [1], for inclusion on the lunch menu. On that day, it was served to the Queen and all the foreign dignitaries, accompanied by a rice and pea salad.

The recipe was published in advance of the day in newspapers and magazines, so that it could be made and served by ordinary people at their street parties throughout Britain on the Coronation Day.

Some feel that Constance Spry didn't actually invent the recipe; that it was instead her business partner, Rosemary Hume. Still others feel that it was the students at Hume and Spry's Cordon Bleu cooking school who came up with it. In any event, it was the students who prepared it for the Queen's lunch that day in 1953 and it was probably a new treatment of older versions of chicken salad.

The recipe didn't appear in a cookbook until 1956 -- "The Constance Spry Cookery Book." It proved popular with all classes in England, as it made a great buffet dish that could be prepared in advance.
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[1] Spry also managed the flower arrangements at Westminster Abbey and along the processional route that day.

Clay, Xanthe. Best British Recipes: Coronation Chicken. London: Daily Telegraph. 16 June 2010.

Also called:

Constance Spry, Coronation Sauce, Golden Jubilee Chicken

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