Chef who helped create coronation chicken recipe for the Queen says she worked on recipe for a month

The creator of coronation chicken said she worked on the recipe every day for a month before creating the dish for the Queen’s Coronation Day banquet in 1953.

Angela Wood, 88, was a cookery student at Cordon Bleu when she helped create the recipe which became a staple of the Queen’s coronation festivities.

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 pictured today (left) as she looked at 19 when she helped create the dish (right)

Coronation chicken was created to be served at the Queen’s Coronation Day banquet in 1953

Ms Wood, from Kimbolton, Cambridgeshire, has also suggested that she could help create the competition-winning dessert which will be served at the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee in June.

Ms Wood was in her final year as a cookery student at Winkfield Place college, near Windsor, Berkshire, when she helped create the now-iconic dish.

The brief was to create a tasty dish that was flavourful ‘but not too flavourful’ so as to satisfy foreign dignitaries’ palates at the Coronation banquet.

Founders of the dish Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume decided a cold chicken dish coated in a curried creamy sauce would be ‘really easy to serve’, according to Ms Wood.

Angela has offered her help to the Queen in choosing the dessert to be made especially for the Platinum Jubilee this summer

The flavour was created by ingredients that were readily-available in Britain with post-war rationing only recently having ended – meaning imported good were still hard to come by.  

Constance Spry published the recipe for the first time as part of her cookbook

Mrs Wood, who had just turned 19, said: ‘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 recipe they eventually came up with was cooked and served by Cordon Bleu staff and students a few months later at the banquet. 

The competition to create a new pudding to mark the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee runs until 4 February.