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Welcome to Frywall Fridays.

Today we're making Madame Renoir's chicken.

Madame Renoir, Hélène Renoir, was the wife of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the

famous 19th century French painter.

By all accounts, she was a fabulous cook and an exuberant woman, as you can see

if you look up the paintings that Renoir made of her.

And this dish is also exuberant. There are elements of northern French cuisine,

there are elements of Provençal cuisine, and they come together into something

beautiful, luscious, delicious, and loud.

We love it. Let's get started.

The ingredients for the recipe are, for the most part, pretty common. We have

about three pounds of bone-in chicken, some mushrooms, a couple of tomatoes,

some garlic, some thyme, a couple of onions, some parsley. The two somewhat

special ingredients are pitted black olives and also about a half cup of

brandy or cognac.

As with a lot of our dishes, most of the work is gonna happen in the prep.

The onions I'm gonna dice very finely.

Unlike in a lot of recipes, the onions are not going to get sauteed first, so

cutting them finely will allow them to cook quickly and evenly.

I have five cloves of already peeled garlic.

Four of them are going to go whole into the braise. The last one I'm going to

set aside. We're going to use that for the persillade topping at the end.

For the mushrooms, I'm going to quarter them.

Ideally, you'd use smaller button mushrooms, but since those weren't

available, I have these larger ones that I'll cut into four pieces.

We need to peel our tomatoes, and for that, I'm going to start by coring them.

and then just scoring them on top with little x.

Next, they get dropped into some boiling water for just about 10-15 seconds,

and then plop them into ice water.

At this point, the peel comes right off, and I'm going to quarter the tomatoes,

actually cut them into little wedges, probably an eighth of a tomato each.

If you can't get fresh tomatoes or can't go through the step, you can use canned

tomatoes, but really, fresh tomatoes are the way to go for this recipe.

And finally, I'll make a little bouquet garni, which is a little bouquet of

parsley and thyme. I'll tie that together with twine. It'll cook nicely

in the pot, and then at the end, I can just fish it out.

And now we're going to just salt and pepper our chicken lightly on both

sides.

I have a few tablespoons of oil here in my pot heating up, and I'm going to

brown the chicken.

This is a big pot, so I'll be able to fit all six legs here. If your pot isn't

quite as big, do it in stages. You don't want the pieces of chicken to be on top

of each other.

They're going to brown for about six minutes on the skin side.

It should get nice and brown.

And then we're going to flip them and go for about three, four minutes on the

other side.

These are looking great.

They're going to come out and put them on a plate.

At this point I have quite a bit of oil on the bottom of my pot.

I'm going to take out all but about maybe two tablespoons of the oil.

At this point, I can add the chicken back in, along with the onions, the

bouquet garni, and garlic, and bay leaf.

Tomatoes are also going to go in at this point, along with about half a cup of

water. And I'll just arrange everything nicely, and we're going to close the pot

and cook this for about half an hour with the lid closed.

I'll check in occasionally, but not much to do at this point.

While the stew is bubbling away, I'm going to go ahead and make the

persillade. That's a parsley and garlic topping that we're going to add at the

very end.

I'm just using one clove of garlic. Some people would use two.

I don't want to be too garlicky. And a nice handful of parsley.

I'm going to chop that super, super finely.

And it's going to be almost like a little wet-ish powder we're going to add

at the end of the top. It's going to add a lot of freshness and a little bit of

bite.

The chicken has been going for about half an hour. I'm ready to add the rest

of my ingredients.

So I got my mushrooms and my olives and that

half cup of brandy or cognac.

Spread that around.

Try to get everything as much liquid as possible and close the lid. This is

going to go for about half an hour again. And again, we'll check in in

about 15 minutes to make sure everything's coming along well.

Should be ready to go.

All right.

Wow.

This smells amazing. The olives really, really come through and the colors are

gorgeous.

I'm going to put this on a plate here. This would serve up beautifully with

some nice crusty French bread to soak up all this delicious liquid.

We'll put some of this tomato here. Look at that color.

and mushroom and make sure you get a few of the olives as well just like that

and there you have it with the color and the flavor and the smell this

really is something you could imagine an artist loving and we're just going to

top that with some of our persillade to give it some bite and

freshness right at the end there you have it madame renoir's

chicken. Bon appetit!