Coq a la biere

This is like the fast-food version of coq au vin only with beer. That’s not to say it’s a fast fix by any means, but it doesn’t involve two days in the kitchen, and no flames are involved. Counting my advance chopping, I probably spent two hours on this dish, and some of that time was spent just enjoying Verloren while the Jensens rocked out Osmo and the gang’s version of Beethoven’s Sixth.

The recipe exemplifies why I’m on my cooking-through-the-cookbooks quest. It’s a cookbook that came into my possession who knows when and despite its manifold attractions, I’ve never cooked anything from it. Essentially all the recipes make me drool, but I’ve never gotten off my duff to tackle them. That’s partly just overall inertia, and partly the fact that the recipes are long and a little dense, so they’re best made when you can set aside some time without distractions. But based on the results from my first foray, I’d say it was worth the effort. And two hours beats two days by any math.

Chicken Braised in Beer

From “French Farmhouse Cookbook” by Susan Hermann Louis

I’m not going to take the time to transfer the entire recipe, since any adaptation I did to it was pretty minor, and especially since she has delightful phrasing worth reading on its own (we are instructed to cook the pearl onions at a “lively simmer,” a phrase that just made me smile.) This link takes you to the full recipe with details about the book, so I’ll just list ingredients and basic details.

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons olive oil

8 pieces of chicken (use a mixture)

1 large onion, cut in half, then thinly sliced crosswise

2 tablespoons flour

4 cups dark beer

1 bouquet garni comprised of the following wrapped up in cheesecloth: 5 parsley stems, 3 bay leaves, 2 green leek leaves, 12 sprigs of fresh thyme

1 tablespoon butter

40 pearl onions (this is nearly all of two of the standard size bags), peeled

1 cup chicken stock

10 ounces bacon, cut into bite-size chunks

12 ounces cremini mushrooms, sliced into quarters

½ cup parsley leaves

Method:

The chicken gets browned in the oil on all sides in stages, then set aside. The sliced onions get browned in the same pan. The flour is added and stirred/cooked to make a roux. Then all the chicken goes back in the pan along with the bouquet garni and the beer. It gets simmered partially covered for most of an hour. The recipe calls for removing the chicken and reducing the sauce, but I just let the chicken cook a little longer while it reduced over high heat.

Unlike traditional coq au vin, the bacon, pearl onions and mushrooms aren’t added until near the end of the cooking process and are referred to as garnishes. The premise is this makes their flavors be more discrete rather than blended. It does result in more last-minute fuss, as each one gets cooked separately, but it’s darned tasty.

We paired this with a green salad and an apron’s worth of potatoes from the basement larder roasted until they squealed. All-in-all an official Sunday: an afternoon spent exploring the Museum of Russian Art, followed by a suitable extravaganza of food and then time to settle in for the finale of “Downton.” Worked for me.