Coq au Vin [Chicken in wine, with Onions and Mushrooms]
This is just going to be a stub of an entry because I decided to make me and my person a delicious dinner out of Mastering the Art of French Cooking without taking any pictures of it. Crazy, I know.
And this will conclude my two months with Julia Child. I’ll be moving on to Alice Waters and The Art of Simple Food. (I let Luke pick the book, and I think he thinks that “simple” means that it won’t take me so long to cook dinner, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him it probably won’t mean that at all.)
But for today, I’m just going to give you a brief rundown of how letting go of a cookbook feels, and how getting a grasp of a recipe in concept leads us to adaptations, improvisation, learning our pallets, and, well, letting go.
I’ve made coq au vin before. And I’ve made it from MtAoFC before. And there’s something that happens, I’ve talked about it here before, where the pieces of the recipe start to develop in the mind as an internalized process, rather than a set of instructions to follow. Here’s what I mean: coq au vin is beef bourguignon with chicken, hold the carrots. It consists of 6 essential steps: braise baby onions (set aside), brown mushrooms (set aside), saute bacon (set aside), gently brown chicken in butter and bacon fat, simmer chicken in wine and stock, then cook down and thicken the broth into a sauce, and re-assemble to serve. That’s kinda all there is to it.
I’m not going to copy the whole recipe here as it’s already all over the internet. Here it is on Eater.
They don’t really give you the process for the onions here, and I suggest doing that first (not in step 7). It’s a separate recipe in MtA, so if you don’t look at it until you’re simmering the chicken, you’ll rush and burn your onions, or under-braise them. So don’t do that, and get your onions going first.
My favorite part is the onions, but it’s also the biggest pain in the ass of the whole recipe. Peeling 18-24 baby onions takes a while (give em a quick boil then plunge in ice water to help loosen the skins, but it still takes time), and brown braising them takes about 60 minutes. And if you’re not in the mood for that, you can use frozen ones as Ina Garten does in her beef bourguignon, and just throw them unbraised to warm through, but if they’re your favorite part, as they are mine, it’s worth it to use the fresh ones and braise them (it’s hard to braise the frozen ones as they hold onto a lot of water and fall apart, but you can still do it, and who the fuck cares if they fall apart). Frozen onions can make this a weeknight meal. But the real deal brown braised onions elevate it a lot.
Here it is on food.com
Do your herbs need to be in a cheesecloth? No. Do you need to use homemade beef or chicken stock? No. Better than Bouillon is great, even America’s Test Kitchen says so, and they actually try at stuff. Can you throw some wine in there too? Yes. Can you deglaze with some vinegar? Sure. What if you don’t have fresh parsley or thyme? Then go without.
Brown the mushrooms in a separate pan while the chicken is cooking, or do this first to save washing another pan, otherwise this is a 3 pan dish. Recipe says ½ pound, but you can use more, you’ll just need to cook them in batches and use more butter and oil (2T butter, 1T oil per 1/2 lb mushrooms, I don’t bother with the shallots, but you can if you want). Which you can do, I swear. Here the mushrooms are on food.com, too.
Julia calls for 3 cups of wine in the chicken, which leaves a couple ounces for drinking, or you can throw the extra in the onions, or throw in the whole bottle, or give them to your cat. I gave mine to the cat, and he’s super friendly tonight. Keeps running into stuff though.
Here’s one: the bacon and the lardons, and the boiling. Do you care? Should you? Can you tell the difference? Enough that it matters? Julia wants us to boil our bacon because the French bacon isn’t as smoky as our American bacon. Will a little smokiness ruin a coq au vin? It really won’t. Luke gets Hempler’s Butcher Cut bacon for breakfast, so I just use that. And it’s fine. It may fall apart in the simmering a bit, so you can cut it up really fine and let it just be a part of the sauce, or leave it a bit chunkier and you’ll still be able to find it. But it’s in there more for flavor than for texture.
What about the flaming with Cognac? I’ve literally just forgotten to do that step, or not been able to get the cognac to light, and not been able to tell the difference. But it’s fun, so if you have the stuff, and want to, yeah, do it, it’s a hoot. (Tip: put 1T in a metal measuring spoon, and light that, then tip into the pot.) But I wouldn’t bother buying a bottle just for this. And if it doesn’t light, that’s ok too.
Oh and I just use drumsticks and thighs, bone-in skin-on, of course, and cook until they’re registering 190 or so. Overcooked breast is no fun, even if it is soaked in wine. That’s only true about chickens. Don’t read into it. But if you want to break down a whole chicken and use that, go for it. That’s fine too.
I love cooking a recipe for the first time, and getting in the weeds about the prescriptivism of a recipe, especially a vague or self-contradictory one, is part of the fun for me. But learning a recipe, even as a loose concept of steps and ingredients, is incredibly rewarding. This coq au vin was a nearly shopping-list free recipe this go around. I had everything except the parsley and mushrooms already in the house. And I knew I had everything else to make it even without looking it up.
And guys, it’s freaking delicious. Just schmaltzy and comforting, and warming and melty and incredible. I served it with instant mashed potatoes for fucks sake. Make it, make it again, and make it again, add it to your repertoire, make it until you can relax about it.
So long for now, Julia. You’ll always be my first, and I’ll see you again. But I’m really looking forward to jumping into modernity a little, getting the garden planted, and mastering the Art of Simple Food for awhile.
Happy March, everyone. Au revoir.