Food stores in the Marks & Spencer retail chain used to sell Chicken Kiev. Since the outbreak of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, this company have renamed the same stuffed chicken product as ‘Chicken Kyiv”. Which ever name you prefer, what is in the packet is a chicken breast stuffed with butter and garlic. It is delicious.
The first time I ordered Chicken K in India was at Kwality – an old-fashioned restaurant on Calcutta’s Park Street,
The décor in Kwality might have been considered fashionable or even ‘modern’ when it opened in 1952, but it looks as if nothing apart from regular painting has been done to it since then. Stepping into Kwality is like stepping back more than 70 years, but that is not a problem. Both the Indian and Western dishes served by the gentlemanly waiters, who are simultaneously both haughty and obsequious, are tasty and well-prepared.
The first time that I visited the restaurant, I ordered Chicken Kiev. It took about 45 minutes to arrive, but it was superb. Unlike British restaurants where this dish is usually pre-prepared, at Kwality, it is made fresh, from scratch. The copious hot butter that oozed out of the Kiev was without garlic. That is how this dish is often served in other restaurants in India, and is true to the original recipe, which, some say, originated in a hotel in Kiev at the beginning of the 20th century. However, its origins are not at all certain as Tony Jackman wrote (www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-03-03-throwback-thursday-chicken-kiev/):
“… it’s a chicken breast fillet that has been pounded and given a stuffing of cold butter, then crumbed and cooked. That is the tradition as found in hotel restaurants, particularly in the latter decades of the 20th century and in recent decades in supermarket freezers as a ready-meal. What it is not, purists say, is a chicken breast filled with flavoured butter. Chicken Kyiv is seen as a modern variation on Côtelettes de Volaille, or kotleta de-voliay, a stuffed chicken breast dish which a host of sources cite as being of Russian origin with French influences. In the 1840s, Russian royals, as they were wont to do, sent their chefs off to Paris in search of new fare for their bounteous table, who then returned with a dish for chicken “cotelettes”, or cutlets, stuffed in the way we know Chicken Kyiv to be.”
A year or two later, we visited Kwality, specially to have their delicious Kiev again. When I ordered it, the waiter said that I would need to wait an hour and a half for it to be prepared. Realising that this probably meant that it was too much trouble for the kitchen to prepare one portion, I ordered something else.
So, I leave it to you: Kiev or Kyiv? Garlic or not?
