Ingredients
- 1 good French chicken, about 1.6kg, ideally with giblets
- ½ a small lemon
- A bunch of tarragon
- A packet of butter
- 300ml white wine
- 300ml good chicken stock
- 3 cloves garlic
- 100ml whipping cream
Method
Take the chicken out of the fridge a good hour before you want to cook it. Also take a good knob of butter from the fridge and let it soften.
Check the inside for giblets and remove if they are there.
Squeeze the lemon and keep the juice for later and put the lemon half in the birds cavity. Pick the tarragon and keep the leaves and put the stalks inside the cavity too.
Preheat the oven to 180C.
Put the chicken into a good sized roasting pan and slather it with the softened butter. Season it well with salt and pepper, inside and out. Add the wine and then bash the garlic cloves and add them to the pan. If the chicken comes with giblets I like to chop them all roughly and fry them hard in a splash of oil and then put them in the roasting pan when you add the wine. Remember if you do this that when you take the chicken from the pan you will need to pass the pan juices through a fine sieve before continuing with the recipe. Put the roasting pan in the oven and start roasting. Every twenty minutes baste the chicken with the buttery juices. Thirty minutes into the roasting add the chicken stock to the pan.
In my oven at home it will take between an hour and an hour and fifteen minutes to cook. To check it is cooked, insert a skewer into the thickest part of the thigh and then look to see that juices that run out are clear. Or a meat probe into the same part and you are looking for a core temperature of 65C(the temperature will continue to rise as the bird rests). Note; can I make the comment that not unreasonable to assume that the reader has cooked many a chicken ad will know when to take it from the oven?
Take the chicken from the oven and lift it from the pan and rest it somewhere warm for at least twenty minutes. Whilst the chicken is resting tip the pan juices into a saucepan. Bring them to the boil and add the cream. Simmer the liquid and whisk in a knob of butter and add a seasoning of the lemon juice. Coarsely chop the tarragon which you will add two minutes before serving.
Carve the chicken. I take off the legs and separate the drumstick from the thigh. Then I take off the breasts and and halve them. Then take a moment to pull off any pieces of meat that are clinging to the carcass and the oysters on the underside. Enjoy these as the carvers perk whilst you serve the chicken or add to your guest’s plate Divide the chicken onto plates and spoon over the sauce.
