French Provincial Cooking (95 page)

Recipes for this famous dish vary a good deal and one meets with many bad imitations in which a boiling fowl is cooked to rags and then warmed up in some ready-made sauce vaguely flavoured with wine. There is also an idea that the sauce must be thickened with the blood of the animal to make a genuine
coq au vin.
This is not necessarily the case.

A typical Burgundian recipe, from the Cloche d’Or in Dijon, is as follows:

 

‘Cut a cockerel into joints; in an earthenware saucepan melt a few pieces of streaky bacon, previously blanched; add some small onions and the pieces of chicken; when these have taken colour, pour off the fat. Set light to a glass of brandy, pour it over the chicken, then add a bottle of old red Burgundy and a little stock; season with salt and pepper; add 2 cloves of garlic, a bouquet of parsley and bay leaf. When it starts bubbling, close the pot hermetically and simmer gently. When cooked, remove the garlic and the bouquet, add a few mushrooms, and bind the sauce with
beurre manié
; cover, and let it bubble once more.’

This all sounds very easy but, in practice, it is difficult to get the sauce to the right consistency without spoiling the bird by overcooking; so one of two methods can be adopted. The first is to cook the bird whole and carve it for serving while the sauce is going through its final reduction and thickening. The second is to half prepare the sauce before cooking the bird, as follows:

 

Ingredients are a 2
to 3 lb. cockerel or roasting chicken,
bottle of inexpensive but sound red Burgundy or Beaujolais or Macon,
lb. of salt pork or unsmoked bacon, 6 to 8 oz. of button mushrooms, 12 to 16 very small onions of the pickling type, a small glass of brandy, a carrot, an onion, herbs, garlic, seasonings, butter and oil, fried bread, a dessertspoon of flour.

(1) Have the chicken cut into four pieces.

(2) Make a little stock from the giblets of the bird, with an onion, carrot, bouquet of herbs and very little salt.

(3) Put the red wine into a large wide pan with a couple of bayleaves, a sprig of thyme and a crushed clove of garlic. Add
pint of the chicken stock. Simmer steadily for about 20 minutes until reduced to about half its original volume. During the last 5 minutes put in the mushrooms, washed and dried. Strain the wine, discard the herbs and garlic and keep the mushrooms aside. The seemingly large amount of wine is necessary to the dish on account of the reducing process, which in turn gives the sauce its characteristic flavour. Indeed, most recipes specify a whole bottle, but it is possible to manage with a little less.

(4) Cut the salt pork or bacon into little cubes. Put it in the rinsed-out pan with a good lump of butter and a few drops of oil. When the fat from the pork starts to run, put in the little onions and, as soon as they have taken colour, add the pieces of chicken, well seasoned with salt and pepper, and let them fry skin side downwards. When the skin has turned a nice golden colour, turn the pieces over, and cook another minute. Turn them over again. Heat the brandy in a little saucepan or soup ladle. Set light to it and pour it flaming over the chicken. Shake the pan and rotate it until the flames die down. Pour in the wine. Put a fresh bouquet of herbs and garlic in the centre. Cover the pan. Simmer gently for 40 minutes. Put in the mushrooms and cook 5 more minutes.

(5) Transfer the chicken, mushrooms, onions and pork or bacon cubes to a hot dish and keep warm in the oven.

(6) Have ready a number of triangles of bread, say 3 for each person, fried in butter, oil or beef dripping, and keep these also warm in the oven.

(7) Have ready a tablespoon of butter worked with a level dessertspoon of flour and divided into little pieces the size of a hazel nut. Add these to the sauce in the pan. Stir over a gentle flame until the flour and butter have melted into the sauce. In less than a minute it will be thickened. Just let it come to the boil (it is a fallacy that you must not let a sauce thickened in this manner come to the boil, but it must only just do so) and it will take on a shiny, glazed appearance. Pour it over and round the chicken, arrange the fried bread round the edge of the dish and serve quickly.

Unorthodox though it may be, this method produces an excellent
coq au vin.

This recipe is given by Paul-Louis Couchoud, writing of the specialities of the Dauphiné in
La France à Table.

 

‘This is a simple dish but a difficult one to do well. With the chicken you must cook some cloves of garlic as large and as round as hazel nuts. They must be as saturated with the juices, as
rissolées,
and (this is of capital importance) as tender and sweet as new potatoes. To bring about this miracle, you must have heads of garlic from Provence, which have matured quickly and so have not had the time to become too impregnated with their special aroma.’

To me these seem wretched little birds, poor in flavour and stringy in texture. They were evolved some time towards the end of the nineteenth century, in France, and were hailed as a great novelty—a one-man chicken. They are now, I fancy, more popular in England than across the Channel.

However, in a Strasbourg restaurant not long ago, I reluctantly took the management’s advice and ordered their
petit poussin
speciality to follow the superb
foie gras.
The little birds were cooked
à la polonaise,
grilled whole, then coated with breadcrumbs, chopped parsley and hard-boiled egg, and browned crisp on the outside with melted butter. This is, perhaps, the best way of dealing with these baby birds, if you
have
to deal with them. Even so, there is little to recommend them.

Around Easter time and the early summer, when the old hens no longer useful for laying are killed off, different versions of this dish are made in many of the country districts of central France. It is a method of turning an old boiling fowl into a civilised and savoury dish.

Apart from a large boiling hen, the ingredients are
lb. each of minced pork and veal, and all the seasonings one would ordinarily use for a pâté, i.e. a little white wine and cognac, garlic, parsley, pepper, salt, an egg, perhaps pistachio nuts, a calf’s foot and, if possible, a pint or so of veal stock, plus carrots and onions.

The poulterer or butcher must be persuaded to bone the bird for you; there are still many competent ones who will do this, and you never know till you ask.

Mix the pork and veal together, add the liver of the bird first stiffened in butter, then cut into little dice. Season with about 2 teaspoons of salt, pepper, a chopped clove of garlic, a tablespoon of chopped parsley, and about a dozen halved pistachio nuts if you have them. Add a coffee-cupful (after-dinner size) of white wine, a tablespoon of brandy and 1 whole beaten egg. Stuff the chicken with this mixture, reshape it as much as possible in its original form, tie round with string and secure the openings with little wooden skewers. Place on a bed of sliced onion and carrot in a deep oval pot which will go in the oven; put the calf’s foot, divided into four, all round. Pour over the stock, fill up with water just to cover, add a bouquet of bayleaf, thyme and parsley, and cover with two layers of foil or greaseproof paper and the lid. Cook in a very slow oven, Gas No. 2, 310 deg. F., for 3 hours or a little over.

Remove the bird carefully; it is now advisable to continue cooking the liquid with the calf’s foot for another hour at least in order that the jelly which it ultimately produces shall be really firm. Strain it into a bowl; leave to set. Remove the fat. Just melt the jelly; remove the strings from the bird and, in order to facilitate serving, carve into slices obliquely downwards as if you were cutting a sausage. If the leg bones have been left in, as they usually are, they will be soft enough to be carved right through with a good knife. Reshape the bird, put it in a deep serving dish, pour over the jelly and leave to set again.

Serve with a green salad or a potato salad; if you want to give a rather copious meal, it can serve as a first course in the same way as a pâté; otherwise as a main course.

If you prefer, or are obliged, to cook the bird unboned, use the same stuffing but rather less of it (about 4 oz. each of pork and veal) and proceed in precisely the same way, cooking for 4 hours instead of 3.

Instead of pouring the jelly over the bird for serving, cut it into squares, arrange it all round the bird on a flat serving dish and carve as for any other cold chicken.

A boiling fowl, slowly simmered in water with vegetables and aromatic herbs, is served hot, cut into nice pieces, with the following sauce, made at the last moment when the dish is ready to serve.