Notes on Julia Child's "Coq au vin"

You can find Julia Child’s “Coq au vin” recipe in “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” Although you can also find variations of her recipe online, you should own a copy of this book. Be warned, the book has dark side: the recipes are, yes, time consuming. The recipe layout is nice to cook from, but hard to distill into a shopping list. Many of the dishes involve serious amounts of fat, like Coq au vin, for instance, which calls for browning skin-on chicken in bacon fat and butter, and then adding all that fat to the braise (which you do eventually skim off). But the book also has a light side: it’s an incredible reference. Each recipe is a learning experience. The results are masterful.

I’m giving you an ingredient list and an extremely brief version of the instructions. Get the book.

Ingredients:

3-4 oz. lean bacon^[1]
2 Tbs butter
2½-3 lbs cut-up frying chicken
½ tsp salt^[2]
⅛ tsp pepper
¼ cup cognac
3 cups young, full-bodied red wine
1 to 2 cups brown chicken stock
½ Tbs tomato paste
2 cloves mashed garlic
¼ tsp thyme
1 bay leaf
12 to 24 brown-braised onions
½ lb sautéed mushrooms
3 Tbs flour
2 Tbs softened butter
Springs of fresh parsley

Directions:

Lightly brown the bacon. Add the butter. Brown the chicken.^[3] Burn off the cognac. Add ingredients: wine through bay.^[4]
Brown the onions and mushrooms.
Reduce the liquid, thicken it with roux.

Notes:

Although this dish is traditionally accompanied by potatoes, it pairs nicely with quinoa. Carrots would be a fantastic addition to the onions and mushrooms.

This would be an excellent reason to buy a whole chicken and cut it up into parts; and that would be a great way to save money, right? Wrong! Here’s a whole chicken, cut up into parts, including the giblets:

And here’s a close-up of the pricing label:

Notes on Julia Child's "Coq au vin:" cut-up pricing

$1.18 per pound

$1.18 a pound. Now check out this whole chicken, same producer:

Notes on Julia Child's "Coq au vin:" whole chicken

$1.19 per pound

$1.19! It’s a penny more to have them not cut it up for you!

This kind of bums me out, because I love hacking a whole chicken to pieces, but now I have to pay 6¢ to do it! Damnit! The cut-up version even came with giblets. But getting back to the recipe, this Serious Eats article is pretty informative, and I when I make this dish, I like to take a few of its tips and add them to Julia’s masterful work. One of them is to let the chicken marinate in the wine while you’re prepping and cooking the bacon. (Three cups of wine, by the way, is just shy of a full bottle. Don’t fret over this; just use the whole bottle.) Place the chicken into a fairly large bowl, breasts on bottom, and pour the whole bottle of wine over it. When it comes time to brown the chicken, make sure to pat it dry with paper towels, diligently, so that you really get the chicken dry. Don’t discard the wine; use it for the braise.

If you have any leftover, let me suggest removing the meat from the bones and storing it separately from the veggies and sauce. The next day, or in a few days, place the chicken over some quinoa, rice, or couscous. Top it with the veggies and sauce, and nuke until hot.

Annotations:

[1] Bacon: The kind of “lean bacon” that Julia refers to isn’t easy to find in the early 21st century. You might have to do some searching. One of my favorite little mom-and-pop groceries has a bona fide butcher carving out steaks and making his own sausage. He sells me the scraps left over from making bacon – called “bacon ends” – which are perfect for this (as well as boeuf bourguignon). I buy them up and keep them in the freezer. You can make do with thick-cut bacon, sliced widthwise into ¼- to ½-inch segments – but in that case, don’t boil it (as Julia suggests in the book).

[2] Seasoning: Season the chicken very lightly, if at all. Remember that you’re going to be adding stock, which, if it’s store-bought, is probably pretty salty. Also, you’re going to reduce the sauce toward the end of the recipe, which will concentrate the seasonings. If you wind up needing to add salt to the reduction, no big deal. But if it’s too salty … bummer. I recommend not adding salt until you’ve reduced.

[3] Browning the Chicken: You want it really dark – especially the white meat. The braise is going to stain the meat. It’s dull, dark purple looks a lot better on the dark meat than the white. The darker you brown your chicken, the better the white meat will look. So spend the extra time that it takes to get the chicken so brown that it looks nearly ready to eat. Remember not to overcrowd the pan; that will interfere with browning. I had room for about three pieces at a time in my casserole.

[4] Hold the White: Once you’ve got all your chicken in the pot, submerged in wine and bouillon, remove the breasts. This will prevent you from overcooking them, and at the same time will guarantee that there is enough liquid in the pot to cover them, once you add them back in. While you’re waiting for the pot to come to the boil, work a temperature probe into one of the breasts and set the alarm to 165°F. Once you’ve got the pot simmering, give the dark meat about five minutes before you return the breasts to the pot.

[4] Vegetables: You can be super-fancy with the vegetables, or not. This is a type French comfort food; it’s fine if you do a homey version. For instance, rather than dealing with pearl onions, you might grab a large white onion and slice it into thick strips. Some chefs suggest adding the veggies to the pot, as if you were making a stew. This lends flavor to the sauce, but Julia’s sauce is plenty tasty without doing this. The advantage of cooking the vegetables separately is that you can have them perfectly done. The possible exception might be carrots, which take forever to sauté. A half-hour in the pot would probably be perfect for them if they were cut into large pieces.

Notes on Julia Child’s “Coq au vin”

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3 thoughts on “Notes on Julia Child’s “Coq au vin””

Patricia @ Grab a Plate on May 22, 2015

Looks like your dish came out nicely! Love your suggestion of adding carrots, too. I really need to get my hands on this book!

- Jeff the Chef on May 23, 2015
  
  Thanks, Patricia. It did! And you should! I found mine at a 2nd hand store, years ago, and got it for just a couple of bucks. Cheers!
  
  - Joe Kerry on August 23, 2015
    
    It should be on every cook’s shelf.