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Forget coronation chicken, Asian-style lamb is a dish fit for a King

Ken Hom recipe
Ken Hom recipe

Coronation chicken may have been considered suitably extravagant in 1953 but 70 years on, palates have undoubtedly changed.

Britons are urged to celebrate the King’s Coronation on May 6 with a roast rack of lamb with Asian-style marinade or a strawberry and ginger trifle featuring no fewer than 26 ingredients.

A new Coronation website launched on Monday by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is designed to be a one-stop shop featuring everything the public needs to know about the day and how to mark it.

It includes a Spotify Coronation celebration playlist featuring 27 feel-good tracks by artists spanning the generations from the Kinks to the Proclaimers, Tom Jones to Ed Sheeran.

The unfortunate inclusion of Dizzee Rascal, a grime artist convicted of assaulting his former fiancee, was blamed on an “error” after questions were asked and the rapper was swiftly removed.

History about coronations past

The website is hosted by the Government, which is working in close conjunction with Buckingham Palace.

It will be gradually built up over the coming weeks and, like the site created to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee, will feature details of all community events taking place over the bank holiday weekend, information on how to take part and plenty of history about coronations past.

There will be homemade bunting ideas, recipe cards, children’s activity sheets and downloadable toolkits featuring the official Coronation emblem.

Information about how to host a street party or a Coronation Big Lunch on Sunday May 7, how to register an event and  get involved in the volunteering initiative Big Help Out on May 8 will also be added.

For now, the website features three recipes including chef Ken Hom’s rack of lamb, Adam Handling’s trifle and Nadiya Hussain’s coronation aubergine.

All three are far removed from the simple coronation chicken invented for the late Queen’s coronation by Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume, Le Cordon Bleu cookery school founders.

The trifle recipe involves making “Yorkshire parkin” before blooming gelatine leaves in an ice bath and warming strawberry juice before turning to the ginger custard, candied pistachios and roasted strawberries.

Hom’s lamb recipe is said to “represent the hallmark of modern Great Britain”, with the meat bearing the East-West flavours of sesame oil, mustard and soy sauce “with grace and dignity”.

Hom, 73, is a Chinese-American chef who describes himself as “the man who showed the British how to cook Asian food”.

He has presented several cooking shows for the BBC and was appointed an honorary CBE last year. Hom, like British chef Handling, is an ambassador of GREAT, the Government’s international marketing campaign.

Hussain, 38, who rose to fame after winning the Great British Bake Off in 2015, describes her aubergine recipe as “dinner at my mum’s collided with my lunches at school” and suggests it is served as a main dish with crispy onions, raisins and coriander.