Eating like a peasant: chicken with apples and calvados

Yes, you read the title right. Doesn't sound like a peasant dish to you now, does it?

One of the aspects of "cuisine" that most fascinates me (besides learning how to spell it correctly), is how peasant dishes become "canonized" as sacred, fancy dishes for the rich. Did you know, for example, that truffles were once considered the food of the poor? You had to hunt them ,and dig for them, and rich people "just didn't do that kind of thing." Or that oysters and lobsters were given away to the poor at the turn of the century in NYC. Or, that foie gras was originally a way to use every bit of the animal that you had prepared for food. It's a fascinating kind of "inversion," sort of the "gentrifiation of food," when the people who actually raise and hunt and find the stuff, can't afford to eat it anymore.

A glorifiation also happens to composed dishes that were originally associated with the countryside, or peasants. Cassoulet is one of those dishes. In Italy, the pork shoulder cooked in milk. There are many, many others. You could probably say so is chili.

And we romanticize them, and somehow decide "well, that kind of dish is fine for that kind of person, because they have time for all the cooking it takes. "

Uh, no, they don't. These folks probably had, and have, more to get done than you or I do. So the cooking does NOT take that long, or if it does, it's a long braise, or something that can sit for a while. Like pot a feu. or cassoulet, which really only takes an hour to put together, and then cooks for a few.

Then there are dishes that look complex and that take long, but really don't. Like the dish we're talking about today. And this one also points to one of the interesting things about food from a particular country: never assume that what YOU know of that region's cuisine, is all there is to it. The dish in question comes from Normandy, in France. Normandy is in the Northwest. Grapes don't grow well here. But apples do. So the local beverage is not wine, but cider: hard cider. Or apple brandy: calvados. The fats are solid ones: butter, creme fraiche, that kind of thing. And, again, because it is farming country, the animals that are eaten are older, tougher ones, so there's a bit more cooking time involved.

I have seen this recipe in several different places. There are geegaws associated with it, which I've tossed out. For example, I am not going to sit there and boil 3o pearl onions and peel them, and I'll bet your local French farm woman didn't do it either. It's nice, but who needs it? Also, when I looked at the recipes, I thought they had the steps in the wrong order, so I've reversed some of them. Finally, rather than take the approach of using a whole bird, and then having to cook different parts for different lengths of time, I've gone to legs and thighs. Of older birds. How can you tell? They're BIG. Get the biggest legs and thighs you can find. Get an amount equal to six or eight complete legs.

You're also going to need ample butter, a bit of olive oil, two carrots, two onions, four apples, two cups of creme fraiche, a cup of hard cider, a half cup of calvados, and a cup of chicken stock.

This sounds like an expensive dish, doesn't it? Well, for the originators, it wasn't. They had this stuff around. Here it goes.

First, salt the chicken pieces well and pat them dry. Then put them aside. Peel the apples, core them, and cut them each into eight pieces. Get 3 tablespoons of butter melted in a pan, and add the apples. Fry them until they begin to brown (I like to use a mixture of tart and sweet apples. Today, I used winesaps, and sonatas). When the apples have browned, take them off the heat, and put them aside

While the apples are cooking, chop up the carrots and the onions. If you happen to have some thyme and a bay leaf around, great . Use them when we get to the part where we cook the veggies.

Put two tablespoons of olive oil, and two more of butter, in the biggest pan you have. Get the fat hot, and add the chicken pieces, but don't overcrowd. Do the chicken in batches if you have to, and you probably will. When the legs are as brown as you like, put them aside in a bowl, to catch juice. You'll have more fat than you started with, and you should dump out all but about two tablespoons.

Now, add the vegetables and the herbs if you have them. Cook them at medium heat and wait until the onion is completely translucent. Add the cider, and cook it until it's essentially gone.

Now, we're coming to a dangerous part, but pay attention and you can do it. Take the herbs out of the veggies. Move anything flammable away from the pan. Add the calvados, step back and ignite it. It WILL flame up and it will flame up for a considerable time, but it will stop. It's kinda neat to see this happen. When it has all died down, add the chicken and the juices in the bowl, back to the pan. Add a cup of chicken stock and put the herbs bak. Lower the heat, cover the pan, and go away for thirty minutes.

After the thirty minutes, take out the chicken and put it aside for a minute, and then dump the sauce through a collander set over a bowl. Press on the vegetables, and then get rid of them. Put the sauce back in the pan, and add the creme fraiche, one cup at a time. Stir it until it dissolves, and then taste it for salt, and adjust if you have to. Then boil it HARD until it reduces by about half. Put the chicken pieces back in and the apples, stir them in the sauce, let this all warm up, and you are done.

Walk through that recipe. It's not that hard and ultimately, it didn't take that long to make, did it? You can also make it ahead and warm it.

If you want to be authentic, serve this with french bread. You could also serve boiled potatoes, or if you wanted to, rice, but that's hardly traditional.

This is peasant eating? Well, it's always better than the refined stuff. Try making this. Everyone I know who has, has made it again, and again, and again