Baby Squid and Crapaudine Chicken

A birthday week of cooking and growing

This first appeared in The Sunday Times (Ireland) on 18 May 2025

It’s almost twenty years since I worked with Richard Corrigan on his milestone book - much more than just a cookbook - The Clatter of Forks and Spoons. More recently I was his ghost writer for a newspaper column based on the book and I was recalling this the other day as I poured most of a bottle of white wine over a chunk of chorizo in a saucepan.

This is how you start one of his simplest but most flavour-packed dishes: baby squid stuffed with chorizo and feta, a dish that remains a perennial favourite in his restaurant, Bentley’s in London’s West End. I have eaten it many times – it’s exceptionally hard to resist – but this was my first time trying to cook it myself.

The spur to this action was coming across suitably juvenile squid at O’Connell’s in the English Market on a trip to Cork but I had a further incentive in that the dish when served in Bentley’s almost always has a sauce or broth that involves shellfish and Johann must avoid them.

Bringing your chorizo and white wine to the boil and then simmering for 5 minutes has rather a profound effect. I was astonished at how a perfectly decent chorizo was transformed into something genuinely delicious once it had been allowed to cool in the liquid. It somehow ends up tasting more intensely of itself and the texture becomes more open and forgiving. Richard says that he always puts chorizo through this process before using and I suspect I may do the same henceforth.

Anyway, all you have to do is take equal weights of chorizo and feta and chop them very finely. I used a mezzaluna. Blend the two together and stuff the mixture into the squid tubes – Richard says to stop when three- quarters full but next time I’ll go a bit further as I don’t mind some spilling out.

Now you need a very hot heavy pan and just a skim of oil. Sear the squid on each side for one minute, then put the pan in a very hot oven – I used the very top of the Aga roasting oven – for 2 minutes. Then just serve on warmed plates with a splash of the best extra virgin olive oil that you can lay your hands on. I used our stunning Palestinian oil from the West Bank and I have to say I was very pleased with my attempt. This is a dish to add to the regulars.

The many young artichoke plants that I grew from seed are now ready to be planted out as sentries lining part of the (relatively) new driveway and we’re looking forward, in a year or two, to marking the ones with the fleshiest, tastiest and least prickly heads. But in the meantime we have just been devouring a few very precocious ones from our oldest artichoke plant that still delivers after more than two decades. As this is a rather unexpected treat we have adopted a very conservative approach: just steaming and serving with melted butter and a good squeeze of lemon juice. When the rest of the crop comes in, from early next month, it will be time enough for stuffings and vinaigrettes and all the fancy pants restauraurant-ish ways with this favourite vegetable.

We had a birthday gathering last weekend and cooked a small smoked ham (boiled and then briefly baked) and a crapaudine chicken which may sound rather rude but is, in fact, a clever way of cooking the bird. The chicken was a big free range one from Bertram Salter in Co Carlow, always a source of delicious poultry with old-fashioned flavour that can transport me back to childhood.

Crapaudine means toad in French and your chicken ends up looking vaguely like one when cut in such a way as to “hinge” at the neck end. You cut up the sides until you come to the wing joints and then open up the bird and flatten it. This is not the same as butterflied chicken, depite what you might find online. That, I suppose, would be papillon chicken.

I always cook this crapaudine on the barbecue (bone side down) and, as it cooks, apply a great deal of melted butter. You end up eventually with delightfully moist meat encased in gloriously crisp skin; indeed, cooking a chicken this way gives you the maximum amount of that delicious material. Just make sure that the juices run clear before you serve.

The only trouble is lack of gravy, of course, but I was determined to overcome this so I roasted a tray of chicken wings until very well browned, simmered them with onion, celery, carrot, garlic, bay leaf and thyme for a couple of hours, then reduced the liquid until it was syrupy and amazingly intense. Or I suppose you could use gravy granules and, you know, there are times when life is just too busy to take the purist route.

Dessert was that fabulously rich, flourless chocolate cake known as gâteau Lawrence served with whipped cream and raspberries. The star of this celebratory meal, however, was the new potatoes. This was the very first of the Home Guards, planted in the tunnel in January and only just ready to eat. Melted butter, sea salt, black pepper. Perfection. And the supreme vehicle for that laboriously prepared chicken gravy, a jus worthy of such a spud.

Wine:

The celebratory mood called for a suitably festive fizz and we hugely enjoyed the Specially Selected Crémant de Loire (€14.99, Aldi) a thrillingly fresh and crisp combination of Chenin Blanc, Chardonnay and a little Cabernet Franc. The main course saw a motley collection of bottles, mainly Bordeaux, the star being the fabulously elegant Margaux, Château Paveil de Luze 2019 (€45, whelehanswines.ie), voluptuous, seductive, supremely stylish and remarkably well-priced for this level of quality. We finished with Martinez Marsala Superiore Dolce Riserva (€21, celticwhiskeyshop.com), a fortified dessert wine from Sicily that may just be coming back into fashion. Marsala is not just for deglazing the pan when you make saltimbocca!