Coq au Riesling: a casserole made for cold nights

My casserole dish is seeing heavy use at the moment: with each day seeming colder than the last, a blipping stew sitting on the hob feels like a defence against midwinter. This week I’ve been making a variation on coq au vin: coq au riesling. As the name would suggest, coq au vin is a French dish, made by cooking chicken in wine. Traditionally, that ‘coq’ would be a cockerel, older and tougher than the chicken, but the slow braising in the liquor-rich sauce renders it tender and flavoursome. But then, traditionally, the dish would also use blood for thickening. Don’t worry: I’m not going to suggest you try to procure either an ageing rooster or a bag of blood. Some traditions are products of their time, and best consigned to it. Instead, I like to use bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, as the flavour is more robust than with breast meat, and I thicken with flour, which feels distinctly less intimidating than blood.

A standard coq au vin uses red wine, but after a recent hearty, French red-wine braised dish on the Vintage Chef, I decided to ring the changes by giving you a recipe for coq au vin’s Alsatian cousin, coq au riesling. Its paler colour than the coq au vin does not, however, make it a poor relation. In fact, I think I far prefer coq au riesling: chicken and white wine are an obvious pairing, more obvious really than dousing the light meat with a bottle of ballsy, heavy red. Dotted with silky leeks, buttery button mushrooms, and smoky pops of lardons, then enriched with cream, stirred in at almost the last moment, this rich, creamy, and fragrant dish feels perfect for cold, rainy days.

A couple of notes on the cooking process: as with our boeuf bourguignon recipe, it pays to sauté the leeks and mushrooms separately and drop them into the dish just before serving so that the vegetables brown but don’t stew and become slimy.