Coq au Riesling it’s chicken in a creamy mushroom sauce made with Riesling, a dry but slightly fruity wine from Alsace. While traditionally the dish was prepared with rooster (coq), chicken is now commonly used. For one thing, roosters are much hardier than chickens and take a long time to cook. Secondly, it is not always easy to find a rooster, even in France, where it is the national symbol! Meanwhile, today marks the start of an innovative herbal collaboration between EFC and a climate-conscious online gardening store. Details below.
Coq au Riesling / Alsatian chicken with Riesling
Coq au Riesling Chicken based can be prepared in less than an hour. The chicken is browned in butter and oil with chopped shallots and thyme, then simmered in wine for half an hour. When the chicken is ready, the sauce will be thickened with cream, egg yolk and flour. At the end, add the separately cooked mushrooms. The dish can be served over pasta, rice or mashed potatoes. In Alsace it is generally served on spätzle (egg pasta).
If you were to prepare the dish with the rooster the cooking time would increase to at least two hours. Perhaps this was doable in the old days, when the pot could be left to boil by the hearth, but now it is no longer practical. Poultry farmers must have recognized the change, because it is rare to find a rooster, even at the market. My favorite poultry stand offers several varieties of chicken, duck, guinea fowl, quail and sometimes goose, but to get a rooster you would have to order it in advance, and even then you wouldn’t be sure to get one.
This decline of the rooster in this country’s cuisine clashes with its prominence elsewhere. France boasts a rooster atop almost every church steeple in the country. This is said to be because the morning crowing of roosters symbolizes the transition from darkness to light, with the bird therefore also seen as a symbol of Jesus. But the rooster had become prominent in France long before it rose to prominence on the bell tower .
According to one story, the rooster became identified with France after the Romans conquered Gaul in 58 BC thanks to some mischievous wordplay by the Romans. Because the Latin word rooster it meant both ‘rooster’ and ‘of Gaul’, the winners were able to make fun of the vanquished, even imprinting the image of the rooster on the coins. Once the Romans left, the kings of France adopted the rooster as a symbol for his courage and bravado. The bird lost ground under Napoleon, who preferred the image of the eagle on coins, but has since made a comeback.
As anyone who attended the Paris Olympics will have noticed, today the rooster appears proudly on French sports uniforms. The country’s national football, rugby and handball teams enter combat wearing the rooster. The rooster also has its place at the Elysée Palace, where it is found atop the gates of the palace gardens. But perhaps the rooster’s most familiar French role to those outside of France is in the supremely French dish coq au vinone of the most popular recipes on this site. So now let’s get back to cooking.
In this regard, I am happy to announce the start of a collaboration between The everyday French chef AND future plant (“plant of the future”), a nursery near the French Atlantic coast that grows drought-tolerant plants, including many of the herbs used in the recipes on this site. Readers who want to grow their own herbs at home, as I do, can order them from future plant to pot on windowsills or balconies or to plant in the garden.
For our first collaborative foray, Katya Lebedevthe dynamic young woman running future plantand I’m presenting rosemarywhich can be planted in well-drained soil in early spring. As a recipe we chose crunchy goat’s cheese pastries with rosemary and honey. Click Here to access the recipe on Katya’s website and see how to order rosemary for her. It can ship the young plants to any destination in France or Europe (excluding Great Britain for the moment, but it is working on it).
Katya and I will collaborate on culinary herb posts four times a year, once per season. The next one will arrive in April, perfect for planting herbs that bloom in the summer.
Happy (herbal) cooking!
