Sometimes, Mother Knows Best: French-ified Chicken Delicious, But Family Version Hits Home

Originally Published in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution

I was an adult before I realized that the dish my mother served company – cocoa van – was, in fact, the French recipe coq au vin. True, I had never actually tasted the cocoa in this saucy chicken, but I had assumed the word was figurative, like the "dog" following hot or the (presumed) "corn" preceding "beef hash." We didn't parse food.

My mother always browned the chicken in her big cast-iron skillet on top of sizzling, fat-pooling slices of bacon. Along the way, she factored in onions, garlic, red cooking wine and a heavy lid, under which the chicken gave up any hope of turning to rubber.

The white meat came out firm but not parching or chalky, and the dark meat had lost its gushy pockets of fat during the long braise. Also wonderful: the thin, oily sauce with its flavors of bacon smoke and sweet onion against a winy background. If each serving contained a wiggly piece of skin or boiled bacon, well, that was part of the charm of cocoa van.

The chicken was the centerpiece of an inviolate set entertaining menu. On the side came mushroom rice (Minute Rice with chopped mushrooms) and a congealed salad ring made with syrupy canned blueberries and lemon gelatin, then filled with an entire tub of sour cream.

Maybe it was the Jell-O that made me turn. Maybe my burgeoning Francophilia. But the first time I decided to braise chicken in red wine, I decided to make a "real" coq au vin. This effort meant – first and foremost – switching from slices of smoked Oscar Mayer bacon to lardons, or cubes of salt-cured pork.

The French don't cook with breakfast meats. But making a coq au vin also meant fresh herbs, veal stock and a finished sauce that clings to the meat rather than serves as a wading pool. 

The coq au vin I developed was always good – very good – in a restaurant-food kind of way. And, so, I made it less and less over the years.

When I did, the veal stock would be replaced with canned broth, the fresh herbs with dried, the organic chicken with whatever bird Frank Perdue had to sell. 

Then I finally stopped dicing pancetta or salt pork for lardons and took out the package of Oscar Mayer.

Bingo. 

When I lift the lid and smell the smoke and fried onions, it's 1975, and people are coming over for dinner.

I look at those white-streaked slices of limp bacon and I might as well be looking into my mother's old cast-iron skillet and dreaming of leftover blueberry mold for a week.