It Must've Been Something I Ate:
The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything

How could I have been such a blockhead, I asked myself, rhetorically. It had been right in front of me all these years, or right inside of me, to be more precise.

You know how sometimes you bite into a forkful of breakfast, lunch, or dinner—or even sometimes just a snack—and suddently an eternal truth or universal law reveals itself to you? That's just how it happend this time. There I was, in Oxford, England, in a restaurant called Le Petit Blanc, eating a plate of coq au vin. This is, of course, one of the most famous of all traditional French country dishes—at its most essential, pieces of checken stewed in red wine. I had eaten coq au vin maybe 200 times before. It was the first complicated dish I had ever cooked, taking many times longer to get on the table than a hamburger and requiring the purchase of what then seemed unusual ingredients—a slab of unsliced bacon, dozens of tiny white onions, several bottles of red wine. I had borne the expense and efforts in hopes of impressing a pretty blond female classmate in graduate school. As I remember, it worked but not quite well enough.

Where did I go wrong? While the sauce—really concentrated cooking broth—was lovely, dark, and deep, the chicken itself came out tough, dry, and stringy. Maybe that was the problem. Or was it those slippery little white onions that worm their way into nearly every coq au vin? They are the size of marbles, take forever to peel, and are nearly impossible to bring to the lips, because when you try to spear them with your fork, they fly off your plate and onto your pretty, blond, female classmate's fluffy white angora sweater. Perhaps it was the excess of bouncy, nearly tasteless, cultivated white mushrooms known as champignons de Paris, or just champignons, that litter most latter-day coq au vins?

The Oxford version might just have done the trick. There the chicken was juicy and meaty and full of flavor, and I finished every morsel. For the first time, I understood why people have been eating coq au vin for hundreds or thousands of years. (The French believe that Julius Caesar was served coq au vin in the Auvergne in south-central France during his campaign to subdue Gaul around 54 B.C., and became a total fan.) How was the Oxford coq au vin different than mine?

And then it came to me. Coq au vin means "rooster with wine." They must have used an old rooster, a bird possessing a rich and profound flavor and flesh that stands up to endless stewing. A writer on the history of French food who happened to be at the table confirmed my hunch: Yes, of course, authentic coq au vin must be made with a rooster. Coq means "rooster." How could it be otherwise? He peered into my plate and examined the scattered molecules remaining there, but he could establish nothing. I asked the waiter to ask the chef, but the chef had left for the evening.

Stewing an old rooster in wine makes perfect sense. When making chicken soup, whether my grandmother's incomparable recipe or the broth the Chinese call "superior stock," we buy a mature stewing hen weighing between six and eight pounds, whose flesh is full of savor but far too tough to roast or fry or broil. Mature hens and roosters lose their chief function when their reproductive powers fade. Something must be done with all that flavorful flesh. And the alcohol in wine is a famous tenderizer. Somehow, even then, I knew that when I returned home, my chief mission would be to bring true coq au vin to America, where nearly everybody has eaten something called coq au vin, but where nobody, I felt sure, had ever eaten an old rooster cooked in wine.

All I needed were a recipe and a rooster.

But first I had to check one fundamental fact. I telephoned my indefatigable friend Mira, who is seeking a Ph.D. in classics at Princeton. Was Julius Caesar really fond of coq au vin? Mira turned to Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico (you know, the famous one that starts, "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres"), which I read as a boy in Latin class and which Caesar had written as a kind of campaign biography to gain popularity among stay-at-homes both in Rome and in high schools in the suburbs of New York City. There is not one bite of coq au vin in Commentarii de Bello Gallico. Caesar mentions chicken only once, and that's later, when he gets to Britain, where the people refuse to eat fowl but enjoy cockfights. As for French wine, Caesar tells us that the Gauls had a great weakness for it (though their neighbors in Brittany and Germany banned the beverage in the belief that "it makes men weak and womanish") but does not mention tasting it himself. Where do the French get these ideas?

The restaurant in Oxford had promised to fax me their recipe. Nothing arrived. If there is a cookbook written in English that tells you what to do with old roosters, I do not own it. A few of my French-language books do tell you; what shocks me is that the others use young, female birds and still call it coq au vin. When you make a chicken stew with a young (even female) bird, you can skip the marination, or use white wine, leave out the bacon, forget about the bouillon, and cook everything in just over an hour. This can be a tasty dish. But how anybody who speaks French can continue to describe it as "coq" escapes me. My disillusionment with France and its people continued to mount until I could bear it no longer.

So, I hopped on a plane and awoke in Paris. My first stop was dinner with Mary and Philip Hyman, an American food-historian couple who have lived in Paris for 30 years and recently began work on The Oxford Companion to French Food, an incredibly prestigious assignment. They brought me a chapter from a book entitled Droit [Law] et Gastronomie (1999), by one Jean-Paul Branlard, who grapples with the legal identity and denomination of coq au vin. As you might imagine, considerable litigation has been brought on the subject. The two main issues are whether the word "coq" can include a poule, poulet, coquelet, or chapon, and whether dealcoholized wine counts as "vin." Beginning with a government decree of March 17, 1967, and continuing through a decision in Bourges in 1982, culinary justice remained unblemished: The word "coq" was officially limited to "a male domestic fowl of the genus Gallus, having attained its sexual maturity." But then, in 1986, the Court of Appeals in Rennes scandalously admitted both poule and poulet, claiming to prefer a definition based on actual practice over one grounded in what the judges called "semantics." A few years later, the government opened the floodgates, decreeing that it is not fraudulent "to offer under the title coq au vin, elaborated dishes made from any of the fowls of the genus Gallus: poule, poulet, chapon, coquelet, or coq." (All statutory translations are by the present author.)

Some writers believe that the similarity between the words Gallus and Gallia, the Latin word for "Gaul," explains why the "coq" became the symbol of France. You can be sure that this symbolic "coq" still includes only the proud and swaggering rooster, not the effeminate poulet or castrated chapon. Why have an academy to protect the French language and then carry on like this, I asked the Hymans. They shrugged like French people in the movies and handed me their own formula for coq au vin, using an eight-pound rooster. The Hymans can usually dig up a 300-year-old recipe for nearly anything, but the oldest they've found for coq au vin comes from 1912. They explain that before this century, cookbooks were about fine food, not about country dishes. But how do they know that coq au vin was not actually invented in 1912?

And what about those ubiquitous, cultivated white mushrooms? Surely country cooking like this would call for a wild and rustic fungus, if indeed the dish is centuries old. Yes, but the Hymans tell me that the French were growing white mushrooms in large volumes by the late seventeenth century! Paris was the center of production (which explains why they are still called champignons de Paris) until just over 100 years ago, when it migrated to caverns in the Loire Valley.

My second stop was Le Coq Saint-Honoré, one of the two or three superpremium butchers in Paris specializing in pedigreed chickens, turkeys, and geese, most of them raised in open pasture and fed according to written guarantees. (The shop supplies, among other places, the Plaza Athénée, Taillevent, L'Espadon, the Crillon, Gérard Besson, Le Pré Catalan, and Pierre Gagnaire.) My friend Frédérick Grasser Hermé met me at the shop, which she had already telephoned with an order for two substantial roosters. Our plan was to watch and interrogate the butcher, then rendezvous at Frédérick's house two days later to cook the coq au vin for eight friends who were planning to assemble for her birthday. (Frédérick is consulting chef in charge of the menu at the hot year-old Paris restaurant Korova; her latest book is Mon chien fait recettes [Editions Noesis].)

The shop was spotless, all white tiles and refrigerated cases, and flooded with daylight. Our butcher was a cheerful woman named Marie-Louise Desrimais, and she brought out two 12-pound specimens, both around two years old. Anything smaller, she said, would not be right for a true coq au vin. Our roosters had grown up on a farm in Sarthe, near Le Mans, an area as prized for fine fowl as is Bresse. Marie-Louise removed the two crests and four kidneys—prized morsels to which such extreme food lovers as Catherine de' Medici have become addicted—and discarded the heads. The long necks were chopped and saved for our bouillon, but their skin and the birds' feet were removed and discarded, not what you would do with young, tender chickens but apparently advisable in the case of old roosters. Marie-Louise then disjointed the birds, cut each meaty section crosswise into several pieces, and chopped up the carcass and wings into small chunks. We asked Marie-Louise about her own recipe for coq au vin. "Normale," she replied, and we knew just what she had in mind.

In the end, as often happens, over the course of the next three days Frédérick did nost of the cooking for her own birthday. Traditional, full-bore coq au vins start with a marinade made up of vegetables, herbs, and a powerful red wine. The meaty pieces of rooster—the legs and breast resemble those of a small turkey—are steeped in the marinade for a day or more. Meanwhile, a broth is prepared from the wings, neck, carcass, and backbone, all chopped up. Some bacon—fresh or salted or smoked—is melted and the meaty pieces of rooster are browned in the fat, then covered with wine and broth, and stewed very slowly until the rooster is wonderfully tender. This can take six hours. And then those little onions are boiled or browned or both, and added, along with white mushrooms and the crisp pieces of browned bacon. At the end, the cooking liquid, now deeply aromatic with browned vegetables and rooster flesh, is concentrated into the most savory sauce you can imagine, and poured back over the pieces of rooster, bacon, mushrooms, and onions.

Frédérick's was certainly a full-bore coq au vin. But 24 pounds of rooster for ten eaters? She explained that over the years she has become increasingly unhappy with the breasts of the rooster, which no matter what she tries, come out inedibly tough and dry. Now she uses only the dark meat, the legs and thighs. To make up for the blandness of the white Paris mushrooms, she adds dried wild mushrooms to the sauce, early in the cooking.

If I felt any reluctance to disembark at JFK, it was only because the task of finding the necessary ingredients in New York City was bound to be grueling and enervating. I needed a rooster, and I needed a big one, and not just one but many, if a delicious recipe was to divulge itself. I tried my typically patient, expert, and reliable sources for animal flesh, Lou at Balducci's and Stanley at Lobel's; both took longer than usual to conclude that a rooster was an impossibility.

My assistant Gail and I angrily telephoned the USDA to find out where all the roosters had gone. Thomas Kruchten gave us the full story. Last year, 8.4 billion chickens were slaughtered in the United States (yes, a huge number but, after all, only 31 chickens a person). Most chickens, male and female, were killed and eaten young, seven weeks old on average, and sold without reference to gender. Only 165 million of them, about 2 percent, were allowed to grow to sexual maturity. The vast majority are hens, assigned to laying eggs, some of which produce chicks. Only 5 percent of mature chickens appear to be roosters—eight million a year, one-tenth of 1 percent of all chickens. What becomes of the other male chickens? I grew anxious and queasy at the thought that a billion of them are killed as chicks. A billion boys a year.

Gail despaired of ever finding enough roosters for our important work among this one-tenth of 1 percent. Me, I saw that we were practically home free. There were eight million mature roosters in America, and we needed to find only a fraction of these. I called Victoria Granof, our food stylist and a food writer in her own right, who suggested that I start with an establishment on Linden Street in Brooklyn called Knickerbocker Live Poultry Market. As so often happens, whenever you open a new door in this city, an entire world awaits you on the other side.

Michael Lane, 44, a graduate of NYU film school, bought Knickerbocker with his father 13 years ago, carrying on a family trade that his great-great-grandparents had brought from Russia more than a century before. On a good day, Michael has a thousand live fowl on hand, in cages. Roosters are child's play for him—he sells between 40 and 50 each week—but never for coq au vin. Most of his rooster customers are from India (or of Indian descent, from places like Guyana), who make a special rooster curry, or are Hispanics, who prepare a rooster soup. For years the New York City government had limited the number of live-poultry markets to 30. Then, with so many immigrants coming here from places where people simply do not buy dead chickens, the city lifted the numberical limit while stiffening the hygiene requirements. Sounds Solomonic to me. Now we have 76 live-poultry markets here. The USDA hates it.

Soon, Knickerbocker and I had established a steady traffic in big old roosters from Brooklyn to my house, near Union Square in Manhattan. Each rooster cost $10 and arrived as I had requested it—properly dismembered with only the head, feet, and internal organs missing. Many experiments lay ahead.

First we tried Frédérick's recipe, but using both dark and light meat. She was right. The breasts were stringy and dense and dry, even when cooked ten hours. We moved on to the Hymans' method, though with dark meat only and with smoked bacon, which lent depth and complexity to the sauce, but maybe too much smoke. Then we ordered several large stewing hens on the theory that they would be more available to you, my readers, and might yield equivalent results. The theory was piteously wrong.

Next we tried a combination—dark meat, more wine, smoked bacon (but blanched to soften the smokiness), Frédérick's dried mushrooms—plus we browned the bony rooster pieces and vegetables to flavor the bouillon more richly. This was the best version so far.

Coq au vin is served on the same plate as a fitting starch to sop up the incredible sauce—steamed potatoes, noodles, spaetzle, or rice. Having enjoyed many meals of coq au vin over the past month or two, I would recommend nearly any form of boiled or steamed potatoes. Noodles don't absorb.

It is universally agreed that black pepper boiled in a soup or stock or stew for longer than ten minutes turns bitter and loses its aromatic and pungent properties. Yet few people correct and enhance the old recipes by leaving out pepper until the end. I rigorously held back most of it, grinding it in a peppermill over the sauce a few minutes before serving; in delightful and unexpected ways, very fresh black pepper transforms a sauce into something both perfumed and piquant.

There followed several days of mission creep. Two goals were added. As the recipe had become just a tiny bit arduous, I rearranged it so that most of the work can be finished the day before dinner. Besides, like most stews, coq au vin seems better the next day. The second goal was more pressing. The longer we cooked the rooster, the more the meat fell off the bones, leaving a pot of savory and lip-smacking rooster wreckage.

To tenderize the rooster in advance and thus shorten the stewing time, we increased the period of marination in red wine from one day to one week, and even longer. Results? Ambiguous. Our next solution was to cook the rooster pieces all in one layer and to hold down the stewing activity to a bare simmer—too gentle to agitate the meat. Our coq au vins improved.

The French, especially in restaurant cooking, use a low-temperature method called sous vide, in which the food, cooked or uncooked, is sealed without air, and then very gently heated in a water bath. At an incredibly low 144°F and with lots of time, even the toughest protein is said to emerge smooth and tender. I've had enough experience trying to maintain these stylish French slow-cooking temperatures to know how tedious and uncomfortable it is to stand at the stove for hours at a time, staring at a thermometer. But what about a Crock-Pot? I had never used a Crock-Pot and have always made fun of both Crock-Pots and of people who use them. I throw out every Crock-Pot cookbook that comes my way.

We telephoned several manufacturers, discovered that they all claim minimum temperatures no lower than 190 degrees. Although not as mild as 144 degrees, this is nonetheless below the bubbling point, wil not jostle the pieces of rooster, and may result in a smoother, creamier protein, as when you poach a chicken instead of boiling it. We bought the largest Crock-Pot we could find, a six-quart Rival, and tried to choose among the three temperature settings, "serve," "low," and "high."

Rival's flimsy user manual warned, "DO NOT cook on SERVE setting." So, I flipped the dial to SERVE, waited two hours, got out my digital thermometer, took the temperature of my coq au vin twice, and learned that the Rival's absolutely minimum temperature is an admirable 180°F. Eleven hours passed, most of it spent watching the immobile Crock-Pot plus additional time for reducing and defatting the sauce, and we were eating one of the two best coq au vins we had produced, deeply flavored and tender. I'll never again make fun of Crock-Pots. I apologize.

In France, coq au vin is traditionally thickened with rooster blood or, when that is unavailable, pig's blood—widely available there and sometimes found in New York City's Chinatown. These days, softened butter mixed with flour—called beure manié— is usually substituted for blood. One day, when I cut myself while chopping an onion for the marinade, I briefly considered adding human blood. You need barely more than a quarter cup. But that was after a long day's cooking had diminished my powers of reasoning. I had forgotten to ask Knickerbocker about rooster blood and when I finally thought of it, they said, Sure, we have rooster blood. The Chinese often require a little container of blood with their ducks. Sadly, it was too late to embark upon a new series of experiments.

Several days ago, when our experimental work reached a feverish peak of activity, we received a fax asking for donations of food, raw or cooked, for the rescue workers and volunteers at the World Trade Center site. The nearest collection point was two blocks away at a restaurant named The Tonic, and just before dinnertime we walked over with 18 servings of extremely fine coq au vin made from four old Brooklyn roosters and five bottles of Australian Shiraz, plus a plastic tub of extra sauce. It was rumored that the chefs at the restaurant Balthazar get a police escort whenever they deliver their creations to the volunteer center at Chelsea Piers, but we didn't mind. For we had succeeded in capturing the true and ancient coq au vin. how it compares to the Oxford rooster is lost in the fogs of memory. Ours emerges intact but tender, and its sauce is deep and layered and makes your mouth water just thinking about it.

Between 2 and 4 days before dinner: making the bouillon from the bony pieces and breasts of teh roosters. Begin by arranging the chopped-up pieces of rooster in one layer in two large roasting pans, dribbling a tablespoon of oil over each one, and browning well in a 425°F oven for about 1 hour. Halfway through, turn the meat, add the carrots, leek, onion, and celery, and dribble with another 2 tablespoons of oil.

Lift the roasted rooster parts and vegetables into a stockpot with a capacity of at least 8 quarts. Add the bouquet garni and cloves. Tilt the roasting pans, spoon out any oil, and discard. Pour a total of 1 quart of water into the roasting pans, bring to a boil on the stovetop over medium-high heat, scrape up the coagulated meat juices and vegetables from the bottom of the pans, and pour into the stockpot. Add barely enough water to cover the pieces of rooster and vegetables, about 2½ quarts more. Add the salt, the peppercorns, and the cloves. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, reduce to a bare simmer, and cook, covered, for 3 hours. (If the liquid evaporates too quickly and exposes the other ingredients, pour in a little boiling water.) Let cool for several hours or overnight. Strain and measure. Reduce over high heat to 2 quarts.

Between 2 and 5 days before dinner, marinate the meaty pieces of rooster: Put the 4 drumsticks, the 8 pieces of thigh, and the 2 pieces of lower back into a bowl with at least 6 quarts' capacity. Add the vegetables and the salt. Pour in enough red wine barely to cover, about 2½ bottles' worth. Cover tightly with plastic wrap, refrigerate, and let marinate until 1 day before the dinner.

The day before dinner, cook the coq au vin and prepare the garnishes: Bring about 1 quart of water to the boil in a 2- to 3-quart saucepan, add the bacon, and simmer for 5 minutes. Drain and dry with paper towels.

Remove the pieces of rooster from the marinade and dry with paper towels. Pour the marinade throgh a large strainer set over a 4- to 6-quart bowl. Press the vegetables against the strainer to expel more of the wine and dry the vegetables between paper towels.

Over medium-high heat, in a frying pan large enough to hold half the rooster in 1 layer, brown the bacon in the oil until it is crisp on the surface and barely cooked within. With a slotted spoon or wire skimmer, remove the bacon to a bowl. Spoon out all but 2 tablespoons of the bacon fat and reserve it in another little bowl for subsequent batches of frying. Salt and pepper half the pieces of rooster, put them into the frying pan, skin side down, and brown well on both sides over medium-high heat. Put 2 teaspoons of the flour in a strainer and shake it over the rooster pieces. Turn and brown the floured side. Dust the upper side with flour, turn, and brown that side. Add more of the bacon fat as needed. Remove to a plate and blot with paper towels.

Repeat with the other pieces of rooster. Then brown the vegetables strained from the marinade, dust with flour, brown again, remove to a plate, and blot with paper towels.

Choose a large, heavy pan at least 4 inches deep, large enough to accomodate all (or nearly all) the pieces of rooster in one layer, closely packed. Spoon in the bacon and the browned vegetables and set the pieces of roster on top of them. Pour the cognac over all, put the pan over high heat, and when you hear it sizzle, carefully light the vapors above the pan with a long match or igniter, and shake the pan until the alcohol has burned away. Then pour the wine from the marinade over everything. Pour in enough of the bouillon just to cover the solid ingredients. Over high heat, bring to a boil and immediately reduce to a simmer.

Skim the surface of the liquid for about 10 minutes. Add the dried, revived cèpes or porcini. Reduce the heat further to the barest simmer, cover tightly, and cook for 5 hours.

Check frequently and adjust the heat when necessary. The pieces of rooster should be tender when pierced with the point of a knife but still offer a little springy resistance. Then let the pan and its contents cool overnight to room temperature.

On the day of the dinner, preferably in the morning: With a slotted spoon or wire skimmer, very carefully remove the pieces of rooster from their sauce to a platter or rimmed cookie sheet. Strain the sauce into large glass bowls (2-quart Pyrex measuring cups are extremely handy and let you measure as you go along; I own several), let settle for 10 minutes, and skim off as much fat as you can. You will have about 3 quarts of sauce; reduce over medium-high heat to just over 2 quarts.

Meanwhile, wash the white mushrooms. Cut off their stems to within ¼ inch of the caps, and discard. In a large saucepan, cover them with 2 quarts of water, 2 teaspoons of salt, and the lemon juice. Bring to a boil and cook until the mushrooms are crisp-tender. Drain and blot dry; then season them with salt and pepper and brown them over high heat in a frying pan or saute pan, using any remaining bacon fat and adding vegetable oil.

Choose a casserole capable of holding the pieces of rooster in 1 layer. (The rooster will have shrunk and will fit into a much smaller pan than before.) Spoon in the reserved bacon and the sautéed mushrooms and nestle the pieces of rooster atop them. Pour in the broth, bring to a boil over medium-high heat, uncovered, and immediately reduce to a simmer. Cook very slowly for 10 minutes, skimming frequently.

After 5 minutes, taste the sauce and if it is markedly acidic (from the wine you have chosen), add ¼ teaspoon of sugar. Repeat a few minutes later. Then turn off the heat and cover until dinnertime.

One hour and a half before dinner, bring the coq au vin very slowly to a simmer and cook for ½ hour. Meanwhile, prepare the potatoes, spaetzle, or noodles, and begin cooking them.

Once again, gently remove the pieces of coq to a serving dish. Strain the sauce and scatter the bacon and mushrooms over the rooster. Cover with foil and hold in a warm place. In a 3-quart saucepan over medium-high heat, reduce the sauce to about 3 cups. (It should have thickened and be able to coat the back of a wooden spoon [see note], but not have become syrupy or sticky.) There will be more than enough to coat the piees of rooster and flavor the potatoes, noodles, or spaetzle. Add ample black pepper to the sauce—which will transform it in a surprising way—about 20 grindings of the mill, taste for salt, and pour over the rooster. Serves 8 to 10.

Note: Have you ever wondered what recipes mean when they say that a sauce should be thick enough to coat the back of a spoon? Here's what they mean: Dip a wooden spoon into a sauce, remove, and run your finger horizontally across the back, making a wide gap or trail in the sauce. If the sauce is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, it will not immediately run down and fill inthe gap. There must be an easier way to explain this.