French-Style Chicken At Home Is 10x Easier With One Cheap Canned Soup

Fricassee de poulet a l'ancienne is a classic French chicken stew with a herby, creamy white wine sauce. In the United States, it's usually just called chicken fricassee. It's a one-pot meal, so you'd think it would still be popular, but traditional recipes require a sauce thickener called a liaison. This mixture of heavy cream and egg yolks is a pretty core part of French cooking, but, if you're not careful, it can end as a lumpy, curdled disaster. Unsurprisingly, this intimidates a lot of home cooks, but tinned cream of mushroom soup offers a solution for the practically minded cook who wants to bring this classic family dinner back.

The easiest fricassee recipes use only canned soup and milk as liquids for the sauce, while others include the classic version's white wine, cream, and chicken stock alongside the soup. Whichever combination you decide to use, the canned cream of mushroom adds deep umami flavor and helps to thicken the sauce without the need for a liaison. One of the reasons tinned soup makes so much sense for this job is that the other ingredients in chicken fricassee are all pretty much staples. They include shallots or onions, carrots and celery, cremini or button mushrooms, herbs, and of course, chicken.

However you decide to make the sauce, this French-inspired dish is weeknight cooking at its quick and largely hands-off best. Even seasoning is taken care of by the soup, as it tends to be pretty salty. If you want to make the recipe even easier, it's totally fine to use pre-cut mushrooms and onions, frozen carrots, and dried dill and tarragon. You can also take care of any other mildly fiddly prep like chopping fresh parsley or juicing a lemon for finishing the dish while your chicken is browning, which is really the only point you'll actively need to be cooking.

Most recipes for fricassee call for bone-in chicken. While this might seem more intimidating than boneless breast, you're going to leave the bone in while they're cooking so there's no deboning involved. In fact, the bone makes the chicken much less likely to dry out. This means that, once it's browned and the vegetables are cooked, you can pour over the sauce ingredients and let it simmer for 20 minutes without worrying about overcooking anything.

If you use a pan designed to cook and serve in, like one of Aldi's iconic Le Creuset dupes, the process is even simpler; you can just carry the pot over to the table and serve it as is. Plus, there's less washing up, and if you chuck some fresh herbs on top, it'll look the French farmhouse part.