

The chef patron had learned to make this dish in France, he understood its roots. At least several of the guides thought so. I once worked in a restaurant that, at the time, was considered to be the best in the land. There are few things quite so enjoyable as a model dish cooked with sincerity and respect. Yes, let's be inventive, letting a recipe breathe to suit our ingredients and our current fancies, but let us also respect time-honoured recipes. Even then, you might find that some upstart chef has added his own signature. To mess around with it would be to misunderstand it, to somehow downgrade it.Īpart from the odd time-warp brasserie, you will be hard-pushed to find coq au vin in Paris, let alone in Dijon. Where I am the first to say we should cook to suit ourselves, our intuitions and appetites, I also believe that a classic recipe should be just that, a classic. You know, make a patently French recipe with Australian wine or swap a herb or a vegetable to suit what you have available. There is a branch of cookery that says you can mess around with a classic recipe and it won't matter. In other words, a sound recipe that makes all the right noises. The sort whose juices you mop up with bread and a plain, garlic-scented salad. The sort of good-natured food that will fit in with us rather than us having to plan our day around it the sort to eat off plain white plates on a paper tablecloth. Yes, it is a fancy name for a chicken stew, but made with a gamey, strong-boned bird, some aromatic bacon, juicy little mushrooms and a bottle of half-decent wine it is as good a weekend lunch as you can get. This does not mean that our cooking should stand still, it is simply that it annoys me when a good dish is tossed aside in favour of the here-today-gone-tomorrow recipes that come at us like confetti in a gale.

It's absurd, of course, that a dish that has stood the test of time and lined a million happy bellies, is sidelined in favour of something whose charms will rub off within a month or two, but it happens to the best of them. Serve with crusty bread.Sadly, sometimes recipes fall out of favour, buried under an avalanche of new and passing fancies. Sprinkle with chopped parsley and the reserved bacon.Add the onions and mushrooms to the coq au vin. Continue to cook until all the vegetables have softened, 5-8 minutes.

