Don't Sweat the Aubergine

accompaniment; I’d also enjoy this stew with mashed potato.
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VARIATIONS
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    In this recipe, the liquid might not cover the chicken – so perhaps you should call it a braise. As a moistening agent, you could use, instead of tomatoes, some chicken stock, in which case you might want a thickener for the sauce. Dust the chicken with flour before frying it. Or you could braise the chicken in just a little liquid – that provided by the wine, for instance, or even by a tablespoon of vinegar; the chicken will exude juices too. At the end of cooking, finish the sauce with a little butter or cream.
    Add dried porcini mushrooms and their soaking liquid to the braise. Add some sautéed fresh mushrooms at the end. Add fresh herbs: thyme and tarragon are particularly good.
    Coq au vin was ubiquitous in the days when we referred to stews as casseroles, and, perhaps for that reason, it has fallen out of fashion somewhat. A revival is due. The bird should be a cockerel, but you’ll probably have to make do with chicken.
    With one, jointed chicken, use a whole bottle of Burgundy or Côtes du Rhone, as well as a double measure of brandy. Follow the basic beef or lamb stew recipe above: flour, salt and brown the chicken, and remove to a plate; fry onion, celery and garlic; throw in the brandy, and reduce it until it almost disappears; pour in the wine; return the chicken, minus the breast portions, to the casserole. Bring the casserole to a simmer and cook for 45 minutes to an hour, or longer if you like your chicken really tender; add the chicken breasts and cook for a further 15 minutes. Strain the sauce, skim and reduce it as in the basic stew recipe here : you want quite a concentrated reduction.
    For a garnish, fry lardons, as well as mushrooms and/or baby onions. Coq au vin is often served with fried bread: one slice, crusts removed, for each person. As you probably know, bread in a frying pan absorbs a heartstopping quantity of butter; you could lightly butter one side, put the other on a buttered piece of foil, and bake it. It’s not the same, though.
    Nigella Lawson has a recipe for chicken cooked slowly with lemon and garlic . You cut the lemons (two) into pieces, mix them with a jointed chicken, a head of garlic cloves, seasoning, 150ml white wine and some olive oil, and bake everything slowly in a roasting pan covered with foil. Half an hour before the end of cooking, you uncover the pan and turn up the oven temperature , to brown the meat. The drawback of this method, I think, is that browning meat at the end of cooking can expel the last drops of moisture from it; an initial searing expels some juices but leaves behind plenty, some of which, with luck and care, you can retain. So I’d brown the chicken first, in a frying pan; then mix it with the lemon, garlic and salt in a roasting pan, cover the pan tightly with foil (or simply use a heavy casserole) and bake at gas mark 1/140°C for about an hour and a half. You might want to strain the sauce into a saucepan and reduce it.
    The best of all chicken and garlic dishes, and one quite unlike any other stew or sauté recipe, is chicken with 40 cloves of garlic . My favourite way of cooking it is the simplest. Put a chicken, cut up into pieces (or just buy thighs and drumsticks), in a heavy casserole. Separate, but do not peel, the cloves of 4 heads of garlic (it has to be good garlic; and, of course, it has to be a good chicken), and add them, along with salt, and thyme if you like. Pour in a generous glug of olive oil – a good 150ml. Mix everything well with your hands.
    It’s important that the casserole should have a good seal, so that the juices don’t evaporate. Make a paste with flour and a little water, forming it into a thin sausage and placing it around the rim of the casserole; jam the lid on top. Put the casserole in a gas mark 4/180°C oven for an hour and a half; you could turn down the heat to gas mark 1/140°C at the point when you guess that the chicken is cooking – but don’t break the seal to have a look. As you pull off the lid at the table, you release a fabulous aroma. You can eat the garlic, squeezed out of the hulls, with the chicken, or spread it on bits of toast or on potatoes.
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WHY YOU DO IT
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    1 • Forgiving legs . The legs and wings of chicken take best to stewing, and are tolerant of most treatments. You don’t have to handle them with the kid gloves you need when dealing with beef and lamb ( see here ): slow-heating