Coq au vin

HIGHLIGHT of the weekend is my experimental cook on Saturday – a rather excellent coq au vin.

The French recipe calls for a whole chicken to be cooked in two bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape (at around £16 a bottle!).

I improvise. Four chicken thighs, skinned and boned, cooked for three hours in cheap Spanish plonk. I do at least use the whole bottle, though – no need to think of me as niggardly.

The result is a real treat: meat so tender it’s literally melting away. We enjoy it with a cracking Australian Shiraz.

My Good Lady, though, reminds me of one of our stays in France, in a family-run hotel in the Loire Valley. Among our fellow guests were a group of English Bobbies, on some sort of exchange visit with their French counterparts at the local Gendarmerie.

Not one of these fellows could speak the language, of course, and the youngest of the group, little more than a teenager, was hopelessly out of his depth in front of the hotel’s all-French menu.

I stepped in to help out the family, whose guests we were, and who were completely at a loss to explain what was what.

To be fair, once I’d translated the menu most of the Bobbies were quite willing to try something new – all except for the youngster. He wasn’t at all happy at the idea of frogs’ legs or eels and he almost wailed in desperation when I mentioned the hearty country terrine containing offal.

Then I saw the coq au vin. “It’s chicken,” I said, hopefully. He brightened instantly. Unfortunately, this lad’s idea of chicken was as a burger with chips, not something cooked in red wine in French fashion, on the bone. He barely touched it and looked so deeply unhappy that I took pity on him.

I mentioned to one of his companions that there was a MacDonald’s in nearby Saumur; whether they went or not I don’t know.

I have a suspicion that this lad wasn’t a convert to French cuisine on the basis of that coq au vin, though.