Chicken in Mushroom Sauce

Chicken breast, skin on — buy it with the skin if you can, because a skinless breast in this dish has no crust to build and nothing to render, and you'll just be poaching pale meat in cream, which is a different, sadder dish. If you only have skinless, don't panic — sear it hard and fast in the oil alone, accept there'll be less fond, and lean a little harder on the mushrooms and lemon zest at the end to make up the savoury weight you've lost.

The two mushrooms are not interchangeable with each other, but you can be relaxed about the species. The point of using two is textural: the quartered mushrooms (chestnut, button, whatever's cheap) give you bite and a dense, meaty chew, while chanterelles are delicate, almost fragile, and bring a different kind of earthiness — slightly fruity, slightly peppery. If chanterelles aren't sitting in your greengrocer's, don't go hunting — any wild or mixed mushroom works, or just double up on the quartered ones. What matters more than variety is how you fry them: high heat, don't crowd the pan, let them sit for a few seconds between stirs instead of pushing them round constantly. Mushrooms are mostly water. Stir them too much too soon and that water comes out as steam before the surface has had a chance to brown, and you get grey, boiled-looking mushrooms instead of golden ones. Some say mushrooms "shouldn't be washed, only wiped" — true in spirit, but in a London flat with supermarket mushrooms that have already been through three pairs of hands, a quick rinse and a thorough pat-dry does no harm, as long as they're properly dry before they hit the hot fat.

Onion, garlic, thyme, rosemary — this is the aromatic base, and it goes in after the mushrooms deliberately, not before. Onion added too early, alongside raw mushrooms, releases its own moisture right when you're trying to drive moisture out of the mushrooms, and you end up steaming both. Soften the onion separately and you get sweetness instead of rawness; the dried herbs here are doing a background, woodland job rather than a sharp, fresh one, which suits a cream sauce — fresh thyme or rosemary would be lovely too if you have it growing, just use roughly double the amount since dried herbs are concentrated.

White wine and stock together are there for the same reason a good gravy needs more than just meat juices — acidity cuts through the richness of the cream so the whole dish doesn't sit heavy on the tongue. Any dry white you'd actually drink a glass of works; don't buy a dedicated "cooking wine", which is usually salted and flat-tasting and a false economy. If you've genuinely got none in, a splash of cider vinegar or lemon juice stirred into extra stock gets you partway there, though you lose some of the depth. Cornflour mixed into cold stock before it goes anywhere near heat is not fussiness — mix it into a hot pan directly and it clumps into little gluey lumps that never fully dissolve, because the starch granules seize on contact with heat before they've had a chance to disperse in liquid.

Double cream is non-negotiable in the sense that single cream or so-called "cooking cream" will split under heat and reduction — not enough fat to hold itself together once it's been simmering with wine's acidity in the pan. If you want lighter, crème fraîche can work, stirred in off the heat at the very end rather than simmered, but that changes the character of the dish — tangier, less silky.

Lemon zest and juice at the end are not garnish, they're correction — cream sauces, left alone, drift towards flat and heavy, and a little acid and citrus oil (from the zest, which carries far more flavour than the juice) wakes the whole thing back up. Add it too early and the heat cooks off the fragrance; add it right at the end, off or barely on the heat, and you get the lift without losing it to steam. Parsley at the very end does the same job for colour and a clean, grassy note against all that cream and fat — chop it and add it last, because cooked parsley turns a dull khaki and loses any reason for being there.