Chicken with forty cloves of garlic: the French dish that reveals garlic's other self
Origin: Provence, France
From the journey of Garlic.
Poulet aux quarante gousses d'ail, chicken with forty cloves of garlic, is one of the great revelatory dishes in French cooking, and one of the most effective demonstrations of a principle that runs through the entire history of garlic cookery: that heat transforms garlic completely. A sealed pot, a whole chicken, forty unpeeled garlic cloves, herbs, olive oil, and time. What emerges after two hours of gentle braising is extraordinary and, to anyone who has never made it before, counter-intuitive. The garlic, rather than overpowering the chicken, becomes soft, sweet, almost caramel-like, its fierce raw pungency converted by the long, low, steam-sealed heat into something mellow and almost nutty. The unpeeled cloves are squeezed from their skins at the table like a paste and spread thickly on grilled bread served alongside the chicken. The dish belongs to the Provençal culinary tradition and is most closely associated with the cooking of the Luberon and Vaucluse regions of inland Provence, though versions appear throughout southern France and Gascony; where duck confit occasionally replaces the chicken, producing a richer, more unctuous result. The sealed pot is essential: the cocotte or Dutch oven is covered tightly, and in the most traditional recipes, the lid is sealed with a flour-and-water paste (a lute) to ensure no steam escapes. The steam created inside the pot carries the garlic's volatile compounds through the chicken, perfuming the meat from within. The transformation of garlic through prolonged heat is one of the oldest principles in Mediterranean cooking: the ancient Greeks and Romans understood that long cooking converts garlic's sharpness into sweetness; but no dish demonstrates this principle more dramatically than the forty-clove preparation. The number forty is traditional rather than strictly precise: three heads of garlic will produce approximately forty cloves, and the abundance is part of the point. Using fewer cloves would produce a less generous result and less paste to spread on the bread. The American food writer Richard Olney, one of the most rigorous champions of Provençal cooking in the English-speaking world, published a celebrated version in his 1970 book Simple French Food that did much to bring this dish to international attention. James Beard and Julia Child both championed it for American audiences in the following decade. It remains one of the most persuasive arguments in the repertoire that garlic, given the right conditions, is not a seasoning but an ingredient in its own right.
The dish reheats well the following day and some cooks argue it is better for it, as the garlic perfume deepens overnight. A Provençal white wine, Bandol blanc, Cassis blanc, or a Côtes du Rhône blanc, is the traditional accompaniment. The flour-lute seal is worth attempting at least once for the theatre of breaking it open at the table.
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