The Gallic rooster, a tough cookie

Translated from French (please notify us of errors)

*A rooster on a mosaic from Pompeii, National Archaeological Museum of Naples (photo Saliko, Wikimedia commons, CC-BY-SA-3.0)*

At Gergovia, Vercingetorix is said to have sent Caesar a rooster to taunt him, and Caesar to have served it back to him stewed in wine, giving birth to a classic of French cuisine. The recipe, however, has a flaw from the outset: Caesar lost at Gergovia, and the rooster only became Gallic thanks to a Latin pun.

Roosters are rarely cooked, and for several reasons. First, apart from its role as a breeder, the bird yields little: it lays no eggs, and the capon, castrated and fattened, gives far more tender meat. Second, it is rare in the farmyard: one rooster for a multitude of hens. Finally, when a younger and more vigorous specimen replaces it, the flesh of the old male is tough to chew.

French culinary tradition nevertheless includes a famous recipe, particularly in Burgundy and Auvergne: coq au vin. The bird is jointed, marinated, seared and then simmered for a long time in wine to tenderise it, with lardons, mushrooms and pearl onions. A legend traces the recipe back to the Gallic War and credits its invention to Julius Caesar. Here is the story.

Dinner with the enemy at Gergovia

We are at Gergovia, in 52 BCE. Gaul, conquered by Caesar, has risen up behind Vercingetorix of the Arverni, and the Roman general is besieging the Arvernian oppidum. The two armies watch each other from the heights. To defy Caesar, Vercingetorix has a rooster delivered to him, a symbol of Gallic pride and fighting spirit. Caesar then invites his enemy to dinner… and serves him his rooster cooked in wine. In Auvergne, people like to add that it was Chanturgue wine, a cru from the hillsides of Clermont-Ferrand.

Paradoxically, the legend attributes a local tradition to the invader, and it is certainly false. What is more, it has Caesar triumph at table at Gergovia, the only place where Vercingetorix defeated him and forced him to lift the siege.

First, our main source on the Gallic War is Caesar’s own account, supplemented by later authors such as Plutarch, Suetonius and Cassius Dio, as well as by archaeology. Caesar describes the siege of Gergovia at length[1], but neither he nor the others mention any exchange of gifts, any meal between the enemy leaders or any rooster recipe.

Second, the rooster was not a Gallic emblem, and Vercingetorix had no reason to offer one to Caesar as a challenge. Gallic war standards very often feature the boar, never the rooster. The link between the rooster and Gaul comes from the Romans: in Latin, gallus means rooster and Gallus means Gaul. The two words are unrelated in origin, but their resemblance delighted satirists.

In the first century CE, Seneca thus mocks the emperor Claudius, born in Lyon, by applying to him the proverb “the cock is all-powerful on his own dunghill”[2].

A Roman pun

For the Romans, then, the Gallic rooster is nothing more than a mocking pun. When the Gaul Vindex rises against Nero in 68, someone writes on the columns of Rome that the emperor, with all his singing, has woken the Galli, roosters or Gauls[3].

The historian Michel Pastoureau has shown that the roosters depicted on coins, statuettes and carved stones from Gaul led eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars to believe in an emblem of independent Gaul. Yet these objects date back no further than the first century BCE and belong more to the Roman world than to the Gallic one. In Roman Gaul, the rooster chiefly accompanies Mercury, the god whom Caesar described as the most honoured by the Gauls[4].

The rooster only became a French emblem much later. In the Middle Ages, the French king’s opponents revived the old pun to mock the French, who ended up adopting it. The Revolution, then the July Monarchy, made it a national symbol, and it was in the nineteenth century that France chose Vercingetorix as its hero.

Following the trail of the recipe also leads us to a dead end. For centuries, the old rooster was the last to go into the pot, cooked and recooked to make it edible, without anyone thinking it worth writing down how it was prepared. Coq au vin only appears in cookbooks in the early twentieth century, and several wine regions, from Burgundy to Beaujolais, claim to have invented it.

Today, coq au vin remains a renowned dish, but the rooster is usually replaced by chicken or a fattened hen. At Gergovia, it was Caesar who had to break camp: these Gauls are tough old birds.

[1] Caesar, The Gallic War, VII, 36–53. VII, 36, 1: Caesar ex eo loco quintis castris Gergoviam pervenit, “From there, Caesar reached Gergovia in five stages.”

[2] Seneca, Apocolocyntosis, 7, 3: gallum in suo sterquilinio plurimum posse. On Claudius as a “Gaul” born in Lyon, see 6, 1.

[3] Suetonius, Nero, 45, 2: ascriptum et columnis etiam Gallos eum cantando excitasse, “it was also written on the columns that with his singing he had woken the roosters (the Gauls)”.

[4] Caesar, The Gallic War, VI, 17, 1: Deum maxime Mercurium colunt, “The god they honour most is Mercury.”