Coronation Chicken was created by the creator. She said that she spent a whole month working on it before she finally made the dish in time for Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation Day celebrations.
Angela Wood was an 88-year old cookery student at Cordon Bleu, when she contributed to the creation of the famous recipe, which would become a mainstay in the Queen’s coronation celebrations.
She told BBC News: ‘For a month or more, I was cooking a chicken a day and we had to alter the balance of the spices in the sauce to get it right.
The sauce that Ms Wood created at the age of 19 included freshly-ground spices, finely chopped onion, red wine, apricot puree, mayonnaise and cream.
Angela Wood (left), looking back at the 19-year-old Angela when she created this dish (right).
Coronation chicken was first created in 1953 to serve at the Queen’s Coronation Day banquet.
Ms Wood is from Kimbolton in Cambridgeshire and suggested she might help to create the winning dessert for the competition, which will be served during the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations.
She was finishing up her last year of college cookery at Winkfield Place, Berkshire. It was then that she created the now-famous dish.
It was important to make a delicious dish with flavour that would be able to please foreign dignitaries at the Coronation banquet.
According to Ms Wood, Constance Spry (the founders) and Rosemary Hume (the creators) decided that a cold chicken dish with a creamy curried sauce would make it’really simple to serve’.
Angela has offered her assistance to Queen Elizabeth in selecting the dessert for the Platinum Jubilee.
It was created using ingredients easily available in Britain after the war, which meant that imported goods are still difficult to obtain.
Constance Spry made the original recipe available in her first cookbook.
Mrs Wood was 19 years old when she said that for a month, she had been cooking chickens every day. To get the right balance, we had to adjust the spice levels in the sauce.
Cordon Bleu students and staff cooked the final recipe and enjoyed it at the banquet a few months later.
Up until February 4, the competition for a new dessert to commemorate Queen’s Platinum Jubilee will be open.