In Search of Coq

When it comes to retro, you can’t get much more retro than the combination of red wine, bacon, mushrooms and an old farmhouse chicken.

Legend has it that Coq Au Vin was invented for Julius Caesar as he made his conquering way through Gaul and certainly it’s a great dish to fortify you against the soggy French countryside while you merrily go around subjugating, murdering and generally being a right royal Italian pain in the arse.

One suspects if Coq Au Vin was truly a dish created for a conquering Caesar whoever the down trodden French chef who first prepared it probably added a little of is own ‘special sauce’ by way of biting political satire.  Never annoy the chef and/or burn down his village – you will get spit (or worse) in your dinner.

So fast-forward a couple of thousand years; the Roman Empire has fallen, one suspects that the French are still pissing in our soup and Julius Caeser and Kenneth Williams have become the same person.

But Coq Au Vin is still one of the best dishes in the world… if you can get a good Coq.

It might have fallen out a favour a little, but right through the 60’s and 70’s it was a staple of a thousand local French Bistros and suburban dinner parties where it was often served with, God forbid, rice and some awful German wine.

The dish had a whiff of the continent about it, an air of sophistication, it went perfectly with Serge Gainsbourg’s pornographic muttering emanating form the stereo and made us all feel that little bit more glamorous and French. 

Even if we came from Colchester, which, as anyone who has ever been there will testify, is about as far form any sense of glamour as you can get.

And, of course, it was always made with a pale English chicken rather than a robust French Coq.

The whole point of a long slow, braising dish with fat in the form of bacon and a healthy slosh of alcohol is to coax some tenderness into an other wise tough and unyielding bird. Use a young chicken and you can end up with a cloying, gluey mess with an unsatisfactorily tasteless sauce and none of the big, robust flavours that you would expect.

So the challenge becomes to hunt yourself down a Coq.

I searched high and low in some of the best butchers in London and while most said that they could order me a bird, imported at great expense from France (somewhat making a mockery of what is meant to be a hearty peasant dish) none had a Coq in stock.

In the end I settled for the gamest, toughest looking chicken that I could find. There is NO point in making this dish with a cheap supermarket chicken. (In fact if you ever use cheap super market chickens for anything why are you even bothering to read this blog? You clearly know nothing and care less about food so I suggest you fuck off back to stuffing frozen reformed meat products down your neck and leave the food and eating to real men.)

Once you’ve got yourself a game old bird then the recipe is simplicity itself, joint the chicken (something that your butcher should be more than happy to do for you) and then it is just a matter of getting everything on the hob before cracking open your best bottle of red, putting some Serge on the CD player, sitting back and thinking suitable Gaelic thoughts. 


First printed in the excellent http://www.theretrocollective.com/