Chicken Baked in a Salt Crust with Rose-Tinted Sauce

The simple method of baking in salt is thought to originate, as do so many clever ways of cooking, in China. These days, however, the place you would be most likely to find a perfect chicken or fish prepared in this way would be in France, or possibly Spain. Don’t imagine that the chicken turns out at all salty to taste; the salt simply acts as an insulating crust and cooks the bird to a perfection hard to achieve in any other way. You need quite a lot of coarse salt to bury the bird with,