For decades diet fads and a meat-manic culture left us feeling that a piece of chicken was about as mundane as you could get. Fortunately, we’re exiting that era of the poultry passé, thanks in no small part to the efforts of culinarians like cookbook queen Diana Henry, who recently earned a 2016 James Beard Award for her fowl-forward tome A Bird in the Hand. This Persian chicken, for example, is far from ho-hum, packed to the brim with nutty pistachios, bright mint, and fragrant saffron and rosewater—and yields an impressive centerpiece that is anything but a flight of fancy. Get the recipe.
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Maggie Borden is associate editor at the James Beard Foundation. Find her on Instagram and Twitter.