How recipes change: forty clove garlic chicken

There's a "somewhat" legendary recipe from French cooking called "chicken with forty cloves of garlic." The classic way of doing the dish is to push, literally, forty cloves of garlic under the skin of a whole bird. Unpeeled. During the slow roast of the bird, the garlic softens, and flavors the meat. Then, when you carve the chicken, you serve it with french bread, and some of the garlic on each plate. The diners squeeze the garlic, now sweet from baking and flavored with the chicken fat, onto their bread.

It IS a good dish. It is frustrating to prepare, because getting forty cloves of garlic under the skin of a chicken takes a fair amount of time, and a good sense of place: "OH. There's a clove there already." It's really a recipe for cooking at home, because you rarely find people who want to order a whole chicken and share it in a restaurant (except maybe at Zuni Cafe, and there are REAL good reasons for doing it there. YOU MUST).

At one of our favorite, and alas, now gone restaurants, "Inside," chef Charlene used to have forty clove garlic chicken on her menu. But she did it differently. Charlene's was a braise, of chicken parts, with peeled garlic cloves. Like all of her food, it was sublime. But I couldn't figure out how she made it.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times published a recipe for it, and while the recipe is basically good, it has a few features that, to me, are infuriating. For example, the recipe calls for "one four pound chicken, cut into eight pieces." Ok, so if you buy a whole chicken and decide to cut it up yourself, how do you get eight pieces (cutting up your own chicken, by the way, is very easy)? Yes, two legs, two thighs, two breasts and.... Uh..... Unless you know to take each breast half and cut it in half , you don't get eight pieces. A butcher will do it for you, but 'fess up: how many of you buy your chicken from a butcher, and ask him or her to cut it up? The other problem with a recipe like this, is something cooking columns like the one in the NY Times warn you about all the time: DIFFERENT CHICKEN PARTS COOK DIFFERENTLY. If you cook the breasts until they're done, the legs will be underdone, and so forth. So, instead of using a chicken, cut into eight pieces, given that you can buy chicken cut just about any way you like, why don't you use parts that are uniform? Also, the recipe included a very subtle contradiction. In the first step, it tells you to brown the chicken, "cooking it in batches if necessary." It will be necessary. There is no skillet big enough to hold eight pieces of a four pound chicken. Fair enough. But then, after all of the meat is browned, the recipe says "return all of the chicken to the pot." Well, if it didn't fit in the FIRST time, what makes you think it will the SECOND time ? In fact, you have to layer the chicken, and it's not a problem in the recipe. Shouldn't they tell you that? HMMMMMMM? Finally, the recipe simply calls for "forty cloves of peeled garlic." Now, if you don't know how to peel a clove of garlic, peeling forty of them is going to drive you to the point of insanity. Couldn't they have told you how to do it?

I said finally, but I lied. The recipe results in a lot of juice being thrown off. The juice needs to be reduced. No mention of this in the recipe.

Here's how I made it. I used nine chicken drumsticks, because that's what I had. I patted them dry, and salted and peppered heavily, like the recipe said. Then I put them aside to dry while I peeled the garlic.

If you hold a garlic clove in your hand, you will see a pointed end. That's where you want to work. Use a small knife, and make a horizontal cut to take it off. Once you do that, the clove will peel easily. And it has to if you're going to do forty, which is anywhere from six to eight bulbs (Incidentally, Jacques Pepin showed us how to do this on one of his shows. More people should watch him cook. I learn something every time).

When the garlic was ready, I did what the recipe said and added two tablepoons of olive oil, and one of butter, to the largest skillet I had. I had to brown the chicken in two batches, and that was fine. It took me about twelve minutes at high heat When this was done, again I did what the recipe said and put the chicken back in the pan. I moved things around in order to get the garlic cloves in, again as directed, and turned down the heat to medium. I let this cook for about twelve minutes, shaking the pan, and moving the chicken pieces around (something NOT in the recipe, but important if you want uniform browning). Then, I added half a cup of stock and half a cup of white wine (I'm not bragging: I had a little Kistler left over from Thanksgiving, and that's what I used. Use anything dry, or use just stock, or frankly, all wine). Then a cover went on the pan, and it cooked away at low heat for fifteen minutes.

This is where the Times recipe ends, but this is what I did. I took the chicken, and most of the garlic cloves, out of the pan. Some I left behind in the ample juice, and crushed them and stirred until they dissolved. Then I turned up the heat, and reduced the liquid to less than half and poured it all over the reserved chicken and garlic.

All in all, it took about 45 minutes. What the recipe also doesn't tell you is that this dish, like all braises, can be made ahead of time and reheated. And that's just what we're going to do.

If I were making this for Kevin, the potato king of the Village, mashed potatoes would be a must. For us, it will probably be rice. The vegetables from the Farmers' Market this week are chard, yellow cauliflower, and romesco, and I haven't quite decided. Probably romesco. The caulflower would put too much on the yellow end of the rainbow on the plate, and the other proteins this week are tuna steak and pork tenderloin. I think we'll have the chard with the fish, and the cauliflower with the pork.

It's a good dish, not that hard, and again, unless you're really, REALLY hungry, plenty to share. And the garlic cooks to a sweet, SWEET lovely soft "something." Don't worry about scaring off werewolves.