Around My French Table (41 page)

T
HIS RECIPE,
UNE PETITE MERVEILLE
(a little marvel), as the French would say, was given to me years ago by Jacques Drouot, the maître d' hôtel at the famous Le Dôme brasserie in Paris and an inspired home cook. I've been making it regularly ever since. It's one of those remarkable dishes that is comforting, yet more sophisticated than you'd expect (or really have any right to demand, given the basic ingredients and even more basic cooking method).

Here's the recipe at its simplest: You put a chicken and some onions, carrots, and potatoes in a heavy casserole, add Armagnac, slap on the cover, and roast at a high temperature for 60 minutes or so. (One Christmas, after getting the bird into the oven, I took a leisurely mid-meal walk with my friends.) When it's done, you pull the pot out of the oven, lift the lid and admire how golden and gorgeous the chicken is, stir in some water, and march to the dining room. Of course, you'll be pleasantly dizzy by the time you get there—the combination of pride and a deeply aromatic sauce can do that—but you'll be delighted to serve the chicken with its tender roasted vegetables and the sauce. Oh, that sauce: it's just a little sweet and really rather complex—you've got the chicken and vegetable juices, of course, but it's the soft, pruney flavor of the Armagnac that's so intriguing. That you made it by stirring the pan juices with water is just another of this dish's
merveittes.

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. You'll need a heavy casserole with a tight-fitting cover, one large enough to hold the chicken snugly but still leave room for the vegetables. (I use an enameled cast-iron Dutch oven.)

Put the casserole over medium heat and pour in the oil. When it's warm, toss in the vegetables and turn them around in the oil for a minute or two until they glisten; season with salt and white pepper. Stir in the herbs and push everything toward the sides of the pot to make way for the chicken. Rub the chicken all over with salt and white pepper, nestle it in the pot, and pour the Armagnac around it. Leave the pot on the heat for a minute to warm the Armagnac, then cover it tightly—if your lid is shaky, cover the pot with a piece of aluminum foil and then put the cover in place.

Slide the casserole into the oven and let the chicken roast undisturbed for 60 minutes.

Transfer the pot to the stove, and carefully remove the lid and the foil, if you used it—make sure to open the lid away from you, because there will be a lot of steam. After admiring the beautifully browned chicken, very carefully transfer it to a warm platter or, better yet, a bowl; cover loosely with a foil tent.

Using a spoon, skim off the fat that will have risen to the top of the cooking liquid and discard it; pick out the bay leaf and discard it too. Turn the heat to medium, stir the vegetables gently to dislodge any that might have stuck to the bottom of the pot, and add the water, stirring to blend it with the pan juices. Simmer for about 5 minutes, or until the sauce thickens ever so slightly, then taste for salt and pepper.

Carve the chicken and serve with the vegetables and sauce.

MAKES 4 SERVINGS

SERVING
You can bring the chicken to the table whole, surrounded by the vegetables, and carve it in public, or you can do what I do, which is to cut the chicken into quarters in the kitchen, then separate the wings from the breasts and the thighs from the legs. I arrange the pieces in a large shallow serving bowl, spoon the vegetables into the center, moisten everything with a little of the sauce, and then pour the remainder of the elixir into a sauceboat to pass at the table.

STORING
I can't imagine that you'll have anything left over, but if you do, you can reheat the chicken and vegetables—make sure there's some sauce, so nothing dries out—covered in a microwave oven.

BONNE IDÉE
Armagnac and prunes are a classic combination in France. If you'd like, you can toss 8 to 12 prunes, pitted or not, into the pot along with the herbs. If your prunes are pitted and soft, they might pretty much melt during the cooking, but they'll make a sweet, lovely addition to the mix.

I
CAN'T REMEMBER EXACTLY WHEN I FIRST
made a chicken cooked in a casserole that was sealed tighter than the ancient pyramids, but I do remember that it was called Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic and that the recipe came from Richard Olney's deservedly classic cookbook
Simple French Food.
In his version of this traditional dish, the chicken is cut up and tucked into a casserole with four heads of garlic, separated into cloves but not peeled; dried herbs; a bouquet garni; and some olive oil. Everything is turned around until it's all mixed up, the casserole is sealed tight with a flour-and-water dough, and the whole is slid into the oven to bake until the chicken is done and the garlic is cooked through, sweet and soft enough to spread on bread. It's a masterpiece of simplicity, and when the seal is cracked at the table, the pouf of fragrant steam is mildly theatrical and completely intoxicating.

Olney's recipe was the first of I-can't-even-count-how-many chickens in a pot I've made. I've cooked chickens whole and in pieces, with a garden's worth of vegetables and with only garlic, with hot spices and with fragrant herbs, with and without wine, and with and without the dough seal (with is better). I've cooked the chicken in a heavy Dutch oven (my favorite), a speckled enamel roaster (not the best), and a clay cooker (my second favorite; if you use a clay cooker, though, omit the dough seal—the clay is too fragile). And I've cooked it in every season—it's just as good in the summer as in winter.

This, my garlic and lemon rendition, was inspired by a dish made by Antoine Westermann, a chef with a Michelin three-star restaurant in Alsace and a bistro in Paris. That there's nothing Alsatian about his use of Moroccan preserved lemons and nothing particularly French about the addition of sweet potatoes makes the dish even more fun.

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.

Using a paring knife, slice the peel from the preserved lemon and cut it into small squares; discard the pulp. Bring the water and sugar to a boil in a small saucepan, drop in the peel, and cook for 1 minute; drain and set aside.

Heat 2 tablespoons of the olive oil in a large skillet over high heat. Add the vegetables and garlic, season with salt and pepper, and sauté until the vegetables are brown on all sides. (If necessary, do this in 2 batches.) Spoon the vegetables into a 4½- to 5-quart Dutch oven or other pot with a lid and stir in the herbs and the preserved lemon.

Return the skillet to the heat, add another tablespoon of oil, and brown the chicken on all sides, seasoning it with salt and pepper as it cooks. Tuck the chicken into the casserole, surrounding it with the vegetables. Mix together the broth, wine, and the remaining olive oil and pour over the chicken and vegetables.

Put 1½ cups flour in a medium bowl and add enough hot water to make a malleable dough. Dust a work surface with a little flour, turn out the dough, and, working with your hands, roll the dough into a sausage. Place the dough on the rim of the pot—if it breaks, just piece it together—and press the lid onto the dough to seal the pot.

Slide the pot into the oven and bake for 55 minutes.

Now you have a choice—you can break the seal in the kitchen or do it at the table, where it's bound to make a mess, but where everyone will have the pleasure of sharing that first fragrant whiff as you lift the lid with a flourish. Whether at the table or in the kitchen, the best tool to break the seal is the least attractive—a screwdriver. Use the point of the screwdriver as a lever to separate the lid from the dough.

Depending on whether your chicken was whole or cut up, you might have to do some in-the-kitchen carving, but in the end, you want to make sure that the vegetables and the delicious broth are on the table with the chicken.

MAKES 4 SERVINGS

SERVING
If the chicken is cut up, you can just serve it and the vegetables from the pot. If the chicken is whole, you can quarter it and return the pieces to the pot or arrange the chicken and vegetables on a serving platter. Either way, you don't need to serve anything else but some country bread, which is good for two things: spreading with the sweet garlic popped from the skins and dunking into the cooking broth. One of the reasons I like to bring the pot to the table is because it makes for easy dipping.

STORING
If you have any leftover chicken, vegetables, and broth (what we call "goop" in our house), they can be reheated gently in the top of a double boiler or in a microwave oven.

BONNE IDÉE
You can save yourself a little time and some cleanup by using store-bought pizza dough to seal the pot. If you use pizza dough, it will rise around the pot.

W
HENEVER YOU SEE THE TERM
BASQUAISE,
or "in the Basque style," on a menu, you can be pretty sure that the dish contains a ragout of red and green peppers, onions, tomatoes, and a hit of heat, usually from the region's famous chile, the piment d'Espelette. Called
pipérade,
the mélange turns up alongside rice (think "Spanish rice"), mixed with scrambled eggs (when, just to confuse things, the finished dish of peppers and eggs is also called
pipérade),
and as the base of a stew that can include tuna, a treasured catch along the Basque coast, or, as it does here, chicken. In other words, with a pot of pipérade, you can play mix-and-match for a couple of meals, which is what I've been doing ever since my first trip through French Basque Country.