Coq au Vin

Coq au vin is a cornerstone of French country cooking: chicken slowly braised in red wine with smoky lardons, button mushrooms, pearl onions and a bouquet of thyme and bay. The pieces simmer until the meat slips from the bone and the wine reduces into a glossy, deeply savoury sauce, traditionally thickened with a little flour or, in the oldest versions, the bird's own blood.

Though the name means simply "rooster in wine," it is today almost always made with chicken. This is comfort food with restaurant polish — an unhurried braise that rewards a good bottle of Burgundy in both the pot and the glass, usually served with buttered potatoes, egg noodles or crusty bread. Like its close cousin boeuf bourguignon, it turns a humble cut and a bottle of wine into something far greater than the sum of its parts.

Braising tough birds in wine is an old peasant solution: an ageing rooster, too sinewy to roast, becomes tender after hours in an acidic braise. Versions exist across France's wine regions — coq au vin de Bourgogne, au Riesling in Alsace, au vin jaune in the Jura — each built on the local bottle. A romantic legend even traces the dish to Julius Caesar's campaign in Gaul, though there is no real evidence for it.

The dish was largely regional home cooking until the twentieth century, when it came to symbolise French cuisine abroad. Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television demonstrations in the 1960s made coq au vin a signature of the French bistro repertoire for American and British home cooks, cementing its place on menus worldwide.