Coq au vin

I make this with the thighs and legs of good birds, as I don’t like the idea of tender breasts overcooking in the sauce - a stew with a comparatively long cooking time just isn’t the place for them. This dish would originally have been made with a tougher cockerel, stewed with intense wine, bacon and mushroom flavours to turn it into something deep and inky in flavour, but these birds are hard to come by and the nearest comparison in the UK would be a boiler occasionally found in street mar