Julia Child's coq au vin

Tonight's dinner was Julia Child's coq au vin recipe. For those that don't know, coq au vin is simply French for 'chicken in wine'. This recipe uses very similar techniques to Julia Child's recipe for boeuf bourguingnon, which is a beef stew braised in red wine, except that you don't need as long a braising time for chicken as you would for beef. As such, coq au vin is a less time-consuming recipe to make, taking me 1 1/2 to 2 hours total.

You begin your recipe by browning some bacon lardons in butter and setting them aside. This leaves you with the rendered bacon fat to brown your chicken pieces in. Finally, you cover the meat with the bacon, red wine, and stock, and add your seasonings before letting it simmer until the meat is cooked through.

Some other crucial ingredients to a coq au vin

recipe are the sauteed mushrooms and braised pearl onions that you place over top of the stew when served. The onions and mushrooms each have to get prepared separately with very detailed instructions on just how to correctly brown your mushrooms or cook your onions. For the onions, you can braise them in water, red or white wine, or beef or chicken stock. I chose to use red wine since I had it and the onions came out beautiful with a brownish-purple colour.

I made some parsley potatoes (not Julia Child's recipe for them) as an accompaniment. They were simply boiled until tender and then tossed with salt, pepper, margarine/butter, and freshly
chopped parsley.

Despite the apparent simplicity of the coq au vin recipe, it tasted completely delicious. I haven't previously been a wine fan, but the beaujolais that we chose added such depth and richness to the sauce. One would not think that such complexity of flavour could come from a sauce with so few ingredients.