Poultry

Appears in
French Classics Made Easy

By Richard Grausman

Published 2011

  • About
IN FRANCE, it is not at all uncommon for a home cook to prepare recipes for guinea hen, goose, pheasant, squab, quail, and partridge in addition to chicken, duck, and turkey. Chicken, however, is the clear favorite. There are more French recipes for chicken than any other bird—in fact, more than for any other food. Its delicate flavor lends itself to a host of sauces as well as numerous cooking methods. Chicken can be grilled, sautéed, oven-roasted, spit-roasted, fried, poached, and braised.
Duck, whose popularity in this country seems to go up and down, is a less versatile yet delicious dark-meat bird that stands up well to more assertively flavored sauces. In America, where the predominant breed of duck available (the White Pekin) has a layer of fat under its skin, roasting is really the best method of cooking.