Chicken Chasseur

What came first, the chicken or the hunter?

There’s no such thing as a wild chicken.

I know this because last week I was reading an old Escoffier recipe for ‘poulet chasseur’ (lit. ‘hunter’s chicken’) in Le Guide Culinaire and wanted to know a bit more about these fearsome hunters of old and the chickens they hunted. I imagined brave, bearded men brandishing sharp sticks and rudimentary nets, leaving their homes for days at a time to risk life and limb tracking wild chickens across the pyrenees. But chickens, it transpires, are a human invention, a domesticated and hybridised adaptation of the red junglefowl.

With my dreams of pitching ‘Chicken Hunters’ to Netflix in tatters, I learned that the name comes more from the sauce than the chicken itself. The Dictionnaire de l'Académie française dates the use of ‘chasseur’ as a culinary term to the 12th century and suggests it comes from the use of wild mushrooms. Other cuisines use ‘hunter’s style’ to refer to similar dishes, the Italian ‘cacciatore’ and Polish ‘bigos’ are also both meat stews made with mushrooms and wine.

There is another dish called hunter’s chicken that I can find no origin story for, the English (American?) one. Wikipedia says simply “A dish with the English name "hunter's chicken" exists, but is unrelated to chicken chasseur. It consists of skinless and boneless chicken breasts wrapped in bacon, baked, and covered with barbecue sauce and melted cheese” (🤢) and links to a BBC Good Food recipe that opens “What could be more comforting than chicken breasts wrapped in bacon with BBQ sauce and cheese?”. Good question. On my scale of comfort, I think this would come somewhere between shoes that are too small and a nasty rash.

My recipe is a confluence of various recipes from the French tradition and thankfully contains no BBQ sauce, but I have borrowed one element from an Italian cousin of this dish, ‘coniglio alla Ligure’, the Ligurian dish of braised rabbit. The secret to the best ‘coniglio alla Ligure’ is that the black olives are fried alongside the onions at the start, so that’s what we’re going to do.

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Chicken Chasseur

Ingredients:

• 2 Chicken Legs

• 1 Onion, finely chopped

• 200g Button Mushrooms (or quartered chestnut mushrooms)

• About 25 Black Olives

• 2 Cloves of Garlic, finely chopped

• 1 Tbsp Tomato Puree

• 200ml White Wine

• A Bundle of Fresh Thyme and/or Rosemary

• 500ml Chicken Stock (from a cube is fine)

• Mashed Potatoes, to serve

Method:

• Season your chicken legs all over with salt and if you have time, leave them for 30 mins at room temperature. Rub a tsp of neutral oil over the base of a heavy bottom pan and place the chicken in it. Only then, put the pan onto a medium heat (bringing the meat up from cold like this will render out the fat of the chicken and make it much more pleasant to eat later).

• Cook for about 5 mins on each side until nicely golden, then remove from the pan and set aside on a plate.

• Add the onion, mushrooms and olives to the pan and cook for about 5 mins until the onion is soft and translucent.

• Now add the minced garlic and tomato puree, mix well and cook for another 2 mins.

• Make a little well in the centre and pour in the wine, up the heat and let it bubble away and reduce by about half.

• Add your fresh herbs, then pour in the stock. Put the chicken back skin side up into the pan along with any juices left on the plate and bring to a gentle simmer. Cook for about an hour. This is a good time to make your mashed potato.

• Remove the chicken from the pan and set aside, then turn up the heat and reduce the sauce as much as you need to for it to be slightly thick.

• Once ready it should be the consistency of single cream, nice and glossy. In French cookery we call this ‘nappe’ - when the sauce will coat a spoon dipped into it.

Plate up on top of a nice pile of buttery mashed potato. Enjoy!

A quick note before I go: There are quite a few new subscribers since the last time I posted, hello to you and thank you for joining me! I know some of you are here from my good friend Ben over at How I Cook, but for anyone who doesn’t already know about Ben’s beautiful cooking, please do have a look, it’s a real gem of a newsletter. Until next time.