This dish of roast chicken with a garlicky basil sauce tucked under the skin was inspired by my friend Valérie, a superlative cook. It’s a spin-off from a venerable ancestor, poularde en demi-deuil, or ‘chicken in half mourning’, a specialty of Lyon in which truffle slices are slipped under the skin. As truffles are expensive and hard to come by, Valérie often substitutes herbal sauces. One of her favorites is pistou, the Provençal version of pesto.
Poulet au pistou / Chicken with pistou
In fact, pistou is the same as Italy’s pesto genevese minus the pine nuts. To make it you just need a bunch of fresh basil, a garlic clove, a little grated parmesan, olive oil and a blender. While the oven is heating, you create a pocket for the sauce and slip it beneath the chicken skin. If you like, you can add chopped tomatoes and shallots and/or whole garlic cloves to the roasting pan. The result is succulent and ultra flavorful.
Valérie says this dish is not her invention, but I’ve never encountered it before. A quick search of the web turned up nothing identical — plenty of chicken-and-pistou dishes, but none with the sauce inside the chicken. On the other hand, there are many, many recipes for poularde (or poulet) en demi-deuil, one of the triumphs of French gastronomy.
That dish, which rose to fame in the 1930s in the eponymous Lyon restaurant of La Mère Brazier, France’s first female three-star chef, takes its name from the contrast between the black of the truffle slices and the white of a creamy sauce bathing the chicken — half mourning. But Mother Brazier didn’t invent it. She learned how to make it from one of her precursors in Lyon, La Mère Filloux, whose clients never asked for anything else according to Curnonsky, an early 20th century food critic known as the Prince of Gastronomy.
I would love to try my hand one day at demi-deuil, in which a whole chicken is poached with veggies for an hour and a half before the insertion of the truffle slices, then allowed to cool overnight and poached for 90 minutes more the next day. A sauce of broth, cream and wine completes the recipe. As that’s kind of a major production — and I don’t have any truffles at hand — I’ll settle for poulet au pistou for the time being.
Happy cooking.
The idea for this Mediterranean-style dip came my way the other day when a friend brought me a packet of beautiful dried white broad beans. I wanted to use them quickly, but they were so large that I feared they might be intimidating if served whole. So I cooked them to tenderness and puréed them with lemon juice, olive oil, garlic and a dash of cumin. As my friends and I appreciate spice, I added a crushed cayenne pepper as well.
Fluffy gnocchi sautéd with fresh sage in melted butter is one of my go-to dishes when I need to get a quick meal on the table. The butter is browned ever so slightly, enhancing the lusty flavor of the sage, and a topping of freshly grated parmesan adds a delightful tang. This subtle Tuscan-inspired dish is elegant enough to serve for lunch when last-minute guests arrive. And its real beauty is that it takes just five minutes to prepare.
Along with rosemary, thyme, basil, lavender and campanula (bellflowers), I bought a small lemon tree, which is rewarding me with lovely white blossoms that I hope will be lemons by the autumn. They have joined my my venerable sage plant, transplanted from the country some years ago and still producing darling new leaves every spring and pale flowers in the summer.
Baby spinach lightly sautéd in olive oil with garlic is one of my favorite ways of preparing this versatile veggie. Add a dash of lemon juice and you have a treat with a southern French edge. In northern France you’re more likely to find spinach prepared with cream or butter, the leaves most often served whole in a generous pile. I use spinach in maybe a dozen ways — in salads, in omelets, in savory tarts and as a side dish, as in the photo.
This is a fish story, the upshot of which is a dish of baked sea bream with a delicate lime-flavored sauce. It started two weeks ago when I went to the market and my fishmonger wasn’t there — he’d apparently gone on vacation during the French school holidays. So I wandered through the market and found another fish stand with a remarkably beautiful display. In the middle was a large red fish that looked like a giant goldfish.
Although I had never encountered pageot before, I bought two, brought them home and looked it up: red sea bream. Fine. The next day I set to work for my guest. I coated the fish lightly with olive oil, inserted a couple of lime bits in the cavity and oven-baked it whole. While it was baking, I chopped and steamed a leek and made a sauce of cream, lime zest and lime juice. When the fish was done, I set it on a bed of leeks and drizzled it with the sauce. On the side I served steamed baby zucchini. My guest was delighted.
To give you an idea of the wealth of fish on offer at this stand, here’s another photo. On display in just this tiny corner of the stand are daurade royale (gilthead sea bream), merlan (whiting), limande sole (lemon sole), encornets (squid), seiche (cuttlefish), tourteaux (crab), praires (clams), rascasse (scorpion fish), colinot (hake), colinot friture (small hake for frying) and bar d’élevage (farmed sea bass). This is what makes it so delightful to be a culinary-minded person in Paris, even in a time of lockdown.
If you’ve ever been to Paris, you will most likely have encountered a croque-monsieur, the classic French grilled sandwich of ham, cheese and a creamy sauce. No one makes them at home because they’re served on virtually every street corner, at virtually every café. But with the cafés closed now and snow drifting down the other day, I decided to give it a go. And being in a non-traditional mood, I made an open-faced version on rustic country bread.
When I decided to make a croque, my first step was go down the street to a bakery called 
I like the challenge of going into the kitchen and creating a dish with whatever ingredients happen to be around. So the other day I made a zingy salad from a couple handfuls of lettuce leaves bathed in a garlicky mustard vinaigrette, topped with croutons straight out of the oven. I didn’t exactly create it because I’ve been making this salad for years. The pleasure was in finding the fridge nearly bare and still being able to produce a tasty lunch.
A couple years back I was served this intensely flavorful French dish of lamb and beans on a cold winter’s evening by an English friend who happens to be a superlative cook. Snow was drifting down outside her cottage as a maddeningly delicious aroma wafted from the kitchen — rosemary, thyme, bacon, garlic, tomato and lamb. When I asked for the recipe, she said she didn’t have one — she’d been making it so long that she did it by instinct.
This is a French take on that cold-weather classic, split pea soup. A traditional dish in Alsace, where it is known as as erbsesupp, it has a smoky flavor, imparted by bacon, while a drizzle of cream lends a soothing touch. It’s hearty enough to stand on its own as a lunch dish, perhaps accompanied by melted cheese on toast or some cold cuts. And it can be made in less than an hour.
This festive chocolate-pear dessert is the brainchild of the chef 
Preparation is fun. Pear halves are sautéd in butter and sugar until they caramelize and are meltingly tender. The ganache, a classic of French cuisine, is a mixture of high-quality dark chocolate and warm cream, stirred together until they form a smooth, rich sauce. The dessert is refrigerated until set, and may then be served sliced — or whole, to achieve a Yule log effect.
The site now counts more than 400 recipes — phew! — and I have a list as long as my arm of recipes still to come. Most I have posted with a blog entry, but every so often I slip one in surreptitiously for inclusion in the site’s 
And so I leave you, dear readers, with hopes that 2021 will be a year of peace, joy and a return to life as we’ve known it. The Everyday French Chef will be on vacation on New Year’s Day, with my next post arriving on Friday, Jan. 8. Until then, here’s wishing you good health, happy holidays — and happy cooking.
