Pollo alle olive with potatoes and lemon

The taggiasca olive takes its name from Taggia, a small town in western Liguria, and the story the locals tell is that Benedictine monks planted the first trees there in the twelfth century and then spent several hundred years quietly perfecting them while the rest of Europe was busy with plagues and wars. Whether or not any of that survives contact with a historian, the result is a small brown-purple olive with a sweet, almost buttery taste and a stone that seems disproportionately large the first time you meet one.

Ligurians put taggiasche in nearly everything, and one of the best places they put them is a pan of chicken. Olives with chicken is one of those pairings that turns up independently all around the Mediterranean, in Provence, in Sicily, in Morocco, which is usually a sign that something was working for a very long time before anyone bothered to write it down. The salt in the olives does what a stock cube only pretends to do. The lemon cuts the fat. The potatoes go into the same pan and spend forty minutes absorbing everything that comes off the chicken, which is the entire point, and which is why nobody in Liguria would dream of cooking them separately in a second pot like some kind of northern European.

If you cannot find taggiasche, and outside Italy you often cannot, any small black olive sold in brine will do the job honourably. Do not use the sliced ones from a tin, which taste of tin. Do not use the bright green ones stuffed with pimento, which belong in a martini and nowhere else.

The reason this one earns a place in a book about food you carry is those potatoes. Chicken on its own goes slightly sad in a box overnight. Chicken sitting in olive and lemon juices, over potatoes that have been drinking the same juices since Sunday, comes back out of a microwave almost exactly as it went in.