Poule au pot--chicken in the pot--is a classic example of poor people food. A perfect meal for a cold summer night. There are many variations of poule au pot. A quick Google will turn up some very elaborate versions. Unsurprisingly, Larousse Gastronomique's version is conservative. You take a chicken and stuff it with a mixture of sausage meat, ham, liver, onion, garlic and herbs. You place the chicken in a pot of water along with some stock vegetables and simmer it for a couple of hours.
I'm lazy. I didn't make my own sausagemeat. Rather, I bought a decent quality pure pork sausage and removed the casing. To this I added some roughly chopped ham, minced garlic, diced onion, sage, parsley and a small handful of breadcrumbs. I was going to buy liver but the only liver I could find locally was of questionable freshness. I considered buying a small amount of liverwurst and mixing that into the sausagemeat but I wasn't sure how it'd stand up to the long cooking time.
I've made pot au feu before and understand poule au pot to be, essentially, a version of pot au feu centred around chicken. Pot au feu is something you set on the stove (or the fire) and forget for a while. But poule au pot? I don't know. The only time I've boiled chickens, I've followed the recipe in Fergus Henderson's Nose to Tail. And Henderson, he aims to get the chicken to the point of just--just--cooked. Was that what Iwas aiming for here? The 'poule au pot' entry didn't say. Neither did the other entry that the recipe directs you to. I turned to Anthony Bourdain. He uses a much larger chicken (I bought a 1.3 kilogram bird as my girlfriend and I don't want to be eating this all week) and gives it two and a half hours in the water. With a much smaller bird, I'll go for one and a half to two hours.
Bourdain explains, better than Larousse Gastronomique does, that the idea of poule au pot is to use up a big old tough bird. The bird I bought wasn't even an organic free ranger--I'm not that flush at the moment and didn't think, at the time, that I could've caught the train to Springvale and bought a rooster instead--and certainly wouldn't have died old. Mass produced chickens, even most of those sold as free range or corn fed or whatever, don't live anywhere near as long as the chickens that are supposed to go into dishes like this. A problem. I wanted the meat and the resulting stock (which I plan to use for something else) to taste nice, to not be insipid, so I took a lead from Heston Blumenthal's book and sexed up the broth with some extra umami: I added a couple of splashes of Worchestershire sauce and speared one of the celery sticks with a star anise pod.
To serve, I simply portioned up the meat, spooned some hot English mustard into a ramekin and toasted up a small baguette.
Despite the use of an inferior chicken, the results were lovely. Poule au pot is probably my favourite Larousse Gastronomique dish so far.
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