welcome friends welcome back to the
kitchen welcome back to
sunday morning and the old cookbook show
today we're going to do a recipe out of
this cookbook this is my 1859
copy of la cuisineer bourgeois
this is a french cookbook first
published in 1746
in paris written by someone named menaul
no biographical information about this
person whatsoever
don't know if it's a man or a woman what
they did
what their training was any of that
information
men all might as well just be anonymous
this was a
blockbuster cookbook of its time period
my copy published in brussels in 1859
is just one of hundreds if not hundreds
and hundreds and hundreds of
imprints of this cookbook in french
there is even
an 1825 version published in montreal or
for montreal here in canada
pretty much anywhere french was spoken a
version of this cookbook was published
and when i say a version they're pretty
much all the same when you look
through the pages and you look through
the recipes very few changes
and most of those changes are based on
the year that it was published rather
than where it was published
very slowly new ideas were put in so
in the hundred years since the first
publishing to this one
there are some very minor changes not
many not many at all
there's even an english version and
today we're going to do
a recipe out of it called poulard al
bourgeois
now jumping forward to this giant book
sitting here
this is the 1938 larousse
published in paris it is not really a
cookbook
it's it's really the wikipedia
of french cooking pre-world war ii if
you want to find out about a dish or a
recipe or
a specific term in french cooking
this is the book you need to own there's
pretty much everything in here
and there are some recipes in fact
there's a lot of recipes but they don't
give any
ingredient amounts it's just you take
this you put this you put this you put
this put this you put it here
very sort of high level it assumes that
you already know what you're talking
about you just need a little bit of
backup and a little bit of
context to what you're cooking the
recipe we're doing today also appears in
here but there's been a
change so in the
80 or 90 years since this cookbook was
published
the recipe that appears in the 1938
version is slightly different and i'll
get into those as we go along this
recipe
that i'm going to do is the most
basic farmhouse chicken recipe that
you're going to find
all of the ingredients were available to
any farmhouse
in france because they grew it
except for the salt but i'll get to that
so the first thing i need to do is put
some fine butter in the bottom of my
dish it doesn't say how much so i'm just
going to put it in
actually let's go back a step
the first part of this recipe tells you
how to slaughter and clean your chicken
but in this case we're using something
called the poulard
and a poulard is something that i wish i
could have gotten for this recipe
i've just got a supermarket chicken
i could have gotten one if i wanted to
pay
an inordinate amount of money and wait a
long time
a poulard is a hen
that's about 120 days or at least 120
days old
that's been spayed so that it will never
lay eggs
and it has been treated with feed or
fed a diet that is super rich and
fattening
so you get a much older hand that hasn't
laid an egg
that has this incredible rich flavor
not something that's common here in
toronto there are a couple places that
said that
that they could get it for me if i was
willing to wait six or eight months for
them to put in an order so that the
farmer could
prepare one for me um i wasn't really
willing to wait that long
and i know that a lot of people wouldn't
wait that long either
i know that a poulard is something that
you can still get in france
there are in fact chickens in france
that um
have designations of origin they're
protected and they're called poulard a
la bress i believe
so if you can find one of those check it
out if you can't
just get a supermarket hen it'll be fine
or even an older egg laying hand
probably be okay so next into the pan
i'm supposed to put two onions
now we're not browning this chicken at
all
um you'll notice in the 1938 larousse
version you're browning the chicken in
the butter and then you're adding bacon
so it's a little bit closer to the pulae
loren that we made a while back
now for the chicken it says to put the
chicken in
stomach down so stomach breast side down
backbone up and we put it on top of
okay so i'm going to wash my hands
great next up i'm supposed to put the
rest of the onions
over top and who knows how many are
going to actually stick on top
get those in it tells me to put in
two roots and it says to use two roots
but it doesn't say which two roots to
use and that could be down to
my translation skills i speak french
so maybe i've got it wrong but i've
chosen to use carrot
and parsnip because carrot and parsnip
would be everywhere every farmhouse
would have carrot and parsnip
so i'm going to put that in on top
just into the pot asks next for a
bouquet garni of strong herbs so i've
got
thyme rosemary and sage
if i was doing this today not based on
this recipe book i'd be stuffing that
inside the chicken instead of just
putting it
inside the pot or on top of the chicken
but i'm going to do as i'm told and just
put it on top so
and i'm not going to tie them together
it'll be fine
and the only seasoning is a little salt
just salt that's it for seasoning and
like i said everything in this pot was
easily obtainable by any french
farmhouse any french family
pepper would have been imported and
could have been expensive especially in
the 1750s
it would have been a little bit over the
top all of those other spices would have
been the same
so salt easily easily obtainable in
france
they have some of the finest salt in the
world
now it doesn't tell me whether to put a
lid on this or not i'm going to put a
lid on it it says to
cook it over hot ash until halfway
through when we put in some wine
so i've got the oven set up at 350 and
i'm going to put it in i'm going to keep
an eye on it and see what happens
okay so we're halfway through the cook
and use your judgment on what halfway
means it's time to put the wine in
now initially i was pretty worried about
not putting the bouquet garni
inside the bird but the smell in the
kitchen is heavenly right now and i can
only imagine that
doing this inside this closed
environment
that those flavors are all through the
chicken anyway
now with no browning on this bird i
expect it to be kind of
ugly and you know look at that it is
so i'm going to put these to the side at
this point and we're going to pour
in the white wine
so i'm using a petite chevrolet don't
let that name scare you it's just a
french white wine
chablis means that it comes from
burgundy it is a white wine from
burgundy
petit chablis means that it just comes
from a small village
and chablis is just chardonnay
it's a cold climate chardonnay it does
have a different flavor than a
california chardonnay
no doubt about that so i put the wine in
i'm going to put the lid back on and
stick this back
in the oven smells fantastic looks
horrible
i think it's going to be great
okay pulling this from the oven for the
last time and it is
definitely cooked now at this point i
can pick
out the bouquet garni it's done its job
and we can get rid of it
the chicken has that not very pretty
look to it
i know that in north america there is a
real sort of
drive to always have a brown crispy skin
chicken french cooking isn't like that
it's not flavor and texture
is favored over what it looks like so
let's see if i can get this out of the
pot
so the chicken is fall apart tender
there we go now the recipe tells me to
serve the chicken over
a bed of [ __ ] made from the sauce
most people know of a coulee as being
fruit a sweet thing but it's also
a savory thing so uh instead of passing
it through a sieve
like the recipe book tells me to i'm
gonna use a stick blender
so much faster than a sieve
okay so we'll lay down a layer of
coulee
and then i'll see if i can flip the
chicken over to lay in the middle of
this
can i do this without the chicken
fully coming apart
almost oh okay
so hi friends hi glenn another
ugly chicken dish but i'm sure it smells
really good it smells like it's got all
those classic poultry smells right
you've got uh like a
thyme and a an ice age i
stuck my finger in the coulee it tastes
really good too so
spoon then all right i grab forks too
okay
thank you
[Music]
yeah that is really good so
the chicken the breast looks really
moist
the way that it's cooked breast side
down
or um what does it say stomach side down
is what it is what it calls for
that's a bit big
okay i'm gonna get some of that [ __ ]
from the bottom
there we go
that is going to go really well with
asparagus i just picked
that's good i like that it's not even
may yet and we've got fresh asparagus in
our garden this is the earliest
we've ever had asparagus come up in our
garden it's super exciting i'm
super early for toronto to have
asparagus that's really good
um you get a little bit of a hint
of the shabley so it's a northern
climate
chardonnay which has a different sort of
tang
from a california chardonnay or an
australian chardonnay
you can't get a chevrolet from france
get one from
niagara there you go same sort of idea
it's a really good chicken and that
sauce is really good too yeah that's
gonna i have to i'm trying to think
about what to partner that with like
there's there's
you know it's a different take on a
gravy
yeah yeah which is really nice
um and so this is another recipe in my
quest to find
coco van which isn't this is not coco
van the next recipe that i'm going to
show you in
this quest for coco van is what i think
to be
the originating point ah so
stay tuned for that come up in about a
month or six or eight weeks or something
like that when i get around to it
um give this chicken a try thanks for
stopping by see you again soon
you