![]() Whenever I have eaten this in its natural habitat it has always come with wide, flat noodles, and I see no real reason to alter that. What you need is a solid lump that you can cut into thick strips. The rashers with which the British are obsessed are too thin - if they don't burn, they'll disintegrate. It just isn't coq au vin without some fat, juicy strips of green bacon. A little bunch of fresh thyme and a few bay leaves are really all the herbs you need here, otherwise the dish will become confused. I have used small, firm shallots before now and got away with it. Tiny, tight-skinned button onions are correct for adding nearer the end but are infuriatingly difficult to find when you want them. Big fat French onions, the sort that dangle on strings from bicycle handlebars, are what you want for the backbone of the stew. Most classic recipes call for onions and carrots only, but I always add celery or celeriac, too, for its earthy notes. A loud, inky Beaujolais will do the trick. It doesn't have to be from Burgundy or, I suppose, even French, but I would feel uncomfortable using anything else. Much is made of using good quality wine in cooking - a fruity, big-flavoured wine will obviously add more interest than a thin, cheap one - but there is no need to push the boat out. ![]() With their access to fresh air, free-range birds have had the opportunity to build stronger, thicker bones than anything kept indoors, and will make a more sumptuous sauce. Best hunting grounds for older birds are traditional butchers, farmers' markets and mail order. Have a word with your butcher: once you tell him you want a chicken for long, slow cooking he might be able to order a more mature bird for you. The older the bird, the richer the sauce. So whether it was the quality of the local birds, the excellent wines or that soupçon of saliva from each glass that made the difference I will never know. I have never made it better than I did under his beady eye, but then we made it with the dregs of the glasses and bottles from the customers' tables. We made coq au vin every week (believe me when I say that this is one of those dishes that improves, rather than deteriorates, after a few days in the fridge). The chef patron had learned to make this dish in France, he understood its roots. At least several of the guides thought so. I once worked in a restaurant that, at the time, was considered to be the best in the land. There are few things quite so enjoyable as a model dish cooked with sincerity and respect. Yes, let's be inventive, letting a recipe breathe to suit our ingredients and our current fancies, but let us also respect time-honoured recipes. Even then, you might find that some upstart chef has added his own signature. To mess around with it would be to misunderstand it, to somehow downgrade it.Īpart from the odd time-warp brasserie, you will be hard-pushed to find coq au vin in Paris, let alone in Dijon. Where I am the first to say we should cook to suit ourselves, our intuitions and appetites, I also believe that a classic recipe should be just that, a classic. ![]() You know, make a patently French recipe with Australian wine or swap a herb or a vegetable to suit what you have available. ![]() There is a branch of cookery that says you can mess around with a classic recipe and it won't matter. In other words, a sound recipe that makes all the right noises. The sort whose juices you mop up with bread and a plain, garlic-scented salad. The sort of good-natured food that will fit in with us rather than us having to plan our day around it the sort to eat off plain white plates on a paper tablecloth. Yes, it is a fancy name for a chicken stew, but made with a gamey, strong-boned bird, some aromatic bacon, juicy little mushrooms and a bottle of half-decent wine it is as good a weekend lunch as you can get. This does not mean that our cooking should stand still, it is simply that it annoys me when a good dish is tossed aside in favour of the here-today-gone-tomorrow recipes that come at us like confetti in a gale. It's absurd, of course, that a dish that has stood the test of time and lined a million happy bellies, is sidelined in favour of something whose charms will rub off within a month or two, but it happens to the best of them. Sadly, sometimes recipes fall out of favour, buried under an avalanche of new and passing fancies. ![]()
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