This HaBO request comes from Lauren, who is hoping to reunite her friend with this romance:
A friend of mine says the best book she’s ever read was a romance novel.
It was set in the US where the male character is pretending to be an average guy but he’s actually a prince/rich man/something like that. The part that she remembers that sets it apart is that he takes the woman on a date on the beach and serves a whole chicken that’s in a salt block, and he cracks the salt block open.
That’s all I’ve got…
She was excited that I might have a resource that can figure it out, so I hope you experts can make her day!
I think I may know this one? But I’m usually wrong. However, a chicken in a salt block is pretty memorable.
No idea of the book, but the chicken in salt crust is a yummy meal. I’ve made it a couple times, and it’s really dramatic as well as super easy.
You get a deep roasting pan and pour enough kosher salt around a whole chicken to cover it – 5 to 10 lbs, usually. Oven at 500 degrees, if I remember correctly. That’s basically it. As the fat cooks out of the chicken, it makes a very hard crust with the nearest layer of the salt that you have to break through to get to the chicken. That crust keeps the rest of the moisture inside the cavity, instead of evaporating, so it’s super moist.
But be careful when breaking it open! 500 degree salt is HOT. You do not need a chunk of that skittering across the dining table at your guests. I do NOT recommend drinking a bottle of wine while the bird cooks, then using a hammer and your biggest knife. The rolling pin idea sounds much, much safer.
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/salt-crust-chicken-354750
Anna Richland, thank you. I checked the comments solely because I was hoping someone would say something about cooking a chicken in a salt block. So it’s a real thing?
Now I am wondering what the title of the book is.
Beef tenderloin is also a show stopper when prepared this way. I recommend Alton Brown’s recipe in Good Eats 2: The Middle Years. Since uses a salt dough, rather than packing salt all around the meat, you can channel your inner Martha and use the scraps to decorate it. Minimal work, huge reaction at the table.
Also, have we figured out who authored this culinary master hero?
I too want to know what the book is!
And did the Prince actually prepare it, or have it prepared by minions?
Salt crust is also frequently a way to cook fish in beach areas. Mr. Richland’s grandmother used to recall a fish (pompano?) she ate on a trip to Spain cooked in salt crust at the beach. Really, the salt crust is sort of a pressure steamer almost without the pot.
Beef in salt dough – that’s feeling very British! I shall pass it on to the fancy beef cooker in the house, he of the Beef Wellington and the roasts with Yorkshire puddings and similar. (I’m a meatballs or pasta sauce maker when I work with beef … I use most of my creativity on chicken.)
Alton Brown again! Good Eats: The Early Years, A Dome Full of Bass. I love Alton Brown. I’m watching him brine a turkey as we speak. I’ll admit it, he’s who I generally picture for nerdy beta heroes.
WTF! Still no suggestions for who wrote this book? What up bitches?
And always brine your turkey.
Hey, can we do the What Are You Cooking post again?
@DonnaMarie: We’d love to do a cooking post again! Thanks for the suggestion! Also, it’s entirely possible this HaBO got lost in the MacLean craziness. I thought it might be Once a Princess by Johanna Lindsey because it has a prince going to the US, but I know there are a lot of plots with disguised rich dudes.
The more I think about this, the more I think I read this book. Lauren, would you ask your friend if by any chance a small island nation in the Mediterranean is involved, please?
I believe there was some sort of foreign country involved!
I am thinking of a series where a prince of some fictious island nation comes to the USA in disguise to look for a bride. He has something like six weeks to find her and convince her to come back to the island. The heroine is some sort of artsy person… dress designer? interior designer?
One of the things that happens is that the prince takes her on a seaside picnic, but I think it was on that island.
He has other brothers all of who have to find wives. I think their father the king ordered them to be married within a year or something. Anyway the prince I am thinking of was heir to the throne.
It’s a contemporary. Of course there is a jealous ex-girlfriend. The royal family had Greekish names. I think the prince was Demetrius with some sort of last name like Andrakis but that wasn’t it.
Hope this is of soem help.
I’ve scrolled through my database of books I had on my Kindle and nothing jumps out at me. The possibility remains that they are books I had from the library or that they are in my Amazon Cloud. About two years or so after I received the kindle I was advised by the kindle techs to reset it to the original factory settings because it wasn’t working correctly. As I had over eighty pages of content that I either already read and had in a collection by author’s name or had yet to put into a collection, all those books have not made it into my database.
In the book i am looking for the female is the cook. I missed that in the detail. She was the one that prepared the chicken…
Stacy, I’m confused? Who are you in this discussion? Lauren is the one who is the OP of the HABO request. Are you her friend she is trying to help?
Or are you looking for a different book?
I’m the friend looking for the book
AHA!! Well, if the woman is the cook who prepared the chicken, then it is not the book I was thinking it might be.
Gloria Marie, please try to share the title of the book you’re thinking of. I feel I need it in my life.
Stacy, please give as much detail as you can. It might help.
Oh, SarahV2K, I am so very sorry. Just don’t think I can. Maybe someone else who sees this can help you?
I wracked my brains over it yesterday and I simply have no idea. It was not on my kindle when I compiled my database of my kindle’s contents. I have a vague memory of more details. I think there were four princes and a princess. The princess was doing something worthwhile with her life and not required to find a husband. But her brothers were all playboys and their parents, the king and queen, wanted their sons to settle down with their One True Loves, just as had the parents.
About two years after I was given the kindle, the kindle tech at Amazon advised to reset it to the original factory settings because it wasn’t working. Everything I had read had been placed in a collection by author’s name. I had many, many pages of collections and a great many more pages of stuff that I had yet to put into a collection, as well as stuff I had not yet read.
Naturally, after the reset, my kindle had nothing on it. My archive on Amazon is HHUUGGEE. I have no idea when I will ever get it under control. Scrolled it yesterday for fifteen minutes, hoping something would turn on the light bulb and I was barely into books written by authors whose last name begins with B. Sadly, I just can’t take the time to scroll the whole thing.
Bear with me here, because it has been 10 years since I read this book!
I think a minor league baseball team was involved. The male lead was wealthy but pretended not to be while in the USA.
The female was a private cook/chef I believe with her own business.
She served the chicken in salt in a romantic setting on a beach(?) which leads me to believe the book was based in Florida(?).
They fall in love of course and he takes her to his home country and she finds out he is wealthy, but not after she buys housewares including washcloths…
I sound insane that these are the details I remember, but who knows why I can’t remember the important facts!
I appreciate all the input you ladies have given!!!
Hmmm… One of Roxanne St. Clair’s Barefoot Bay stories has an incognito baseball player