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Tastes of the world National dishes to make at home
Flying Jacob
They’re not native to Scandinavia, but bananas have made it onto the menu words: Klaus Kamolz. photography: Fotostudio Eisenhut & Mayer
Sweden.
Chicken, banana and peanuts? Cooking with a Caribbean twist, you may think, or something African, but in fact this dish has nothing to do with either. The Flying Jacob was invented in Sweden and it’s not a traditional recipe. Its invention can even be pinpointed to a specific day: the morning in 1974 that issue 13 of the national cooking magazine Allt om Mat [All About Food] appeared; it included a recipe sent in by a certain Ove Jacobsson, who worked in the air freight industry. Presumably he must have cooked for his kids one day and was proud of what he’d come up with. But then something strange happened. Flying Jacob – the dish’s name comes from the inventor’s job – took Sweden by storm, decades before Facebook and Twitter made new fads normal. The dish became a national institution when it landed on Swedish school dinner menus. It has hardly left them since.
The recipe Serves 4 people 1kg chicken breast (skinned and boned) Vegetable oil 150g bacon 250ml chicken soup 200ml whipped cream 100ml crème fraîche
1tsp garam masala (optional) 3tbsp sweet chilli sauce 200g mushrooms 1 small onion 2 bananas 50g salted peanuts Salt Pepper
Preheat the oven to 230°C. Cut the chicken breast into bite-sized chunks, season and sauté in vegetable oil until golden brown. Next add the finely chopped bacon and onion and deglaze the pan with the chicken soup. Reduce the heat and stir in the whipped cream and crème fraîche. Season with garam masala, chilli sauce, salt and pepper. Cut the mushrooms into fairly thick slices and sauté in a little oil. Let any resulting liquid evaporate. Stir into the pan with the chicken and then pour into an ovenproof baking dish. Cut the bananas into pieces approximately 0.5cm thick and spread around the baking dish. Bake in the oven for 20 minutes, sprinkling the salted peanuts over the dish halfway through the cooking time. Serve with rice.