French A-Z:
Coq Au Vin

"Woe to the child who tried to pass off a substitute hen from the one Maman wanted! Inevitably, after a morning of scrambling up haystacks or crawling through the woodpile to find the hiding place, the old hen was caught and brought to her just reward."
– Monique Hooker, from Cooking with the Seasons







Monique Hooker tells us in the introduction to her wonderfully personal Cooking with Seasons that "I learned early and well that the hand of the seasonal cook is the link between the good earth and family.  The important lesson was taught to me while I was growing up on our family's farm in Brittany.  There, my mother's daily call of 'table!' was a welcome summons to meals celebrating the bounty of each season."  Each spring Monique and her siblings would be asked to track down a chosen hen, which they did, and their just reward "came the next day, as a pot of coq au vin proudly took center

stage on the dinner table."  As I tried her particular recipe (have tried at least two others), it struck me that the most obvious thing in the world is true about this symbolically French recipe named "chicken in wine" – be sure to pick a proper red cooking wine!  Although the recipe does simply call for 4 cups of red wine, the type I chose to execute the dish with, Cupcake Red Velvet,  did not work as intended.

 
The rest of the ingredients were quite beautiful and the chicken itself turned out tender and complex to taste.  It calls for 4 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed, 1 leek trimmed and coarsely chopped, 1/2 pound mushrooms quartered, diced onion, and one half an onion studded with 4 cloves. Place a 3-lb chicken (in 8 pieces) in a pan with these ingredients, leaf and thyme, the bottle of wine and let sit in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours or overnight.  Some of the next steps will be to pull out the chicken from marinade, pat dry, brown the chicken on both sides, and eventually add some flour back into the pot with all the ingredients for thickening and stir in the wine marinade plus enough chicken stock to cover the chicken and simmer for at least an hour.  This process, as chef Hooker so wonderfully conveys, reveals an earthy kitchen aroma virtually unrivaled.  However, and this is a big however....choose the correct red wine!  Elizabeth David, the virtuoso French culinary writer, recommends in her own recipe for Coq Au Vin French Provincial Cooking, a Burgundy or Beaujolais red.  I used what I thought might be appropriate but the Cupcake, it turned out, was far too purple, of all things.  A combination of Zinfandel, Merlot, and Petite Sirah, the Red Velvet, although a considerably adorable red to sip, was not a well chosen cooking wine, which I should have known.  The chicken, yanked out of the pot of more than pleasant French

vegetable, was visibly purple to the skin – it had similarly bizarre features as we see pictures of a human heart!  We peeled the skin away and, not necessarily to our surprise, the interior of the chicken was the kind of tender that cooks dream of, juicy, not in the least over done, moist and yes, tasting of leek, clove, a pinch of bay, etc.  Would I love to make this recipe again with a different red?  Yes.  And I will, yet I will remember that it is the heat and the marinade that makes a chicken, not its color.

Basque Chicken Stew

"Poultry is for the cook what canvas is for the painter."
–Brillat-Savarin











It is written by the great Joel Robuchon that basquaise food refers to "any dish combining local

country ham, tomatoes and peppers...It is the peppers that give their local name pipers to the specialty – the piperade – a tradition that cannot be separated from that of the Espelette pepper, which is the cornerstone of local cuisine."

Basque Chicken Stew

And so, armed with even this small morsel of culinary history, it was fun to tinker for the first time with a few of the traditional ingredients of the French Basque region – peppers, tomatoes, and bacon (ham), to create an aroma and taste that would come to transport the cooking imagination.  Two likewise traditional cooking techniques were asked for in this recipe.  The first is the roasting of the peppers before cut into long slices, a process, it is described, that heightens the natural sweetness and

juicy texture inherent.  Red peppers are nearly completely transformed in the process of cooking, going from its raw state – a sort of crisp astringency – to a state of soft subtle flavor. The other technique is the peeling and seeding of ripe tomatoes, which allows for the tenderest and juiciest cores to be used.  Once bacon is added to this essential duo of the recipe, the heavier proteins follow, yet the sweet, the

smoky, and the acid is firmly established and comes to coat both the chicken pieces and potatoes as they tender.  The recipe asks that the onion and bacon fat begin the cooking process of quartered potatoes, adding parsely, thyme and a bay leaf for the aromatics, then add your variety of chicken pieces, some flour for thickening, white wine and chicken stock, preparing the stew for its fairly short simmer on the burner for somewhere around 25 minutes, flipping the chicken, and finishing with another 20 minutes at least.  As the chicken and potatoes soften and cook, the under contents also soften turning this dish to a near soup, yet saved from that form by the addition of liquid.

As you watch, a learning experience is being acquired.  Just as you come to learn how soup forms its many kinds of bases depending upon stocks and waters, a stew, it seems, has its own criteria of thicker textures and certainly more full portions of meat and in this case potatoes, but none the less also maintains enough liquid form to elevate itself from a standard portioned meal.  As you picture the terrain of the Basque country, perhaps overlooking the Bay of Biscay, one can easily imagine settling in at a bistro table somewhere along the countryside enjoying a stew that smells and tastes like the farmhouse kitchens surrounding.