Ingredients

Serves 4
Prep 20min
Cook 60min

8 chicken pieces
Flour, salt and pepper
1tbsp butter
3tbsp olive oil
1 onion, halved and sliced
2 garlic cloves, finely sliced
Pinch of saffron, ground 1tsp sweet paprika
1tsp cumin
500ml chicken stock
400g tinned chopped tomatoes
100g dried apricots
1 to 2tbsp honey 2tbsp
coriander leaves



At first, I loved the doors in Tunisia: big, studded wooden doors painted in blue, green and pink. Then I grew to hate them because they hid the private world from the public, and from me. Behind the door is the “dar”, a series of rooms built around an internal courtyard in an architectural style that has barely changed for hundreds of years. In there, families sit around meals of tagines, chakchouka, couscous and merguez sausages that I want to see and share.

At least there are no doors in the ancient walled medinas, hiding the pyramids of spices, carpets, incense sticks, vials of mysterious perfumes and distilled elixirs of orange blossom. Perhaps, when I re-create the taste of a Tunisian tagine at home, it might, symbolically, open a door into that scented, inner world.

METHOD

Dust the chicken with flour. Melt butter and oil in a pan and cook the chicken on both sides until golden. Remove it and cook the onion gently until soft. Add the garlic, saffron, paprika and cumin, stirring. Then add the tomatoes and stock and simmer. Put the chicken back into the pan with the honey, apricots, sea salt and pepper and simmer gently, partly covered, for 50 minutes. Scatter with coriander and serve with couscous and harissa (hot chilli paste).

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