You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French. Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the French article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must follow the LLM translation guideline, revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 1,397 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Poule au pot]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|fr|Poule au pot}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Poule au pot is a traditional French recipe, as well as a specialty of Gers and Béarn cuisine, based on a pot-au-feu or chicken stew cooked in broth, in a casserole dish, with vegetables such as carrots, turnips, leeks, onions, and cloves.

Like coq au vin, it became one of the emblems of France. In the 17th century, the King of France Henry IV to instituted and democratized the poule au pot as a "French national dish" by quoting: "If God gives me more life, I will make sure that there will be no ploughman in my Kingdom who does not have the means to have a chicken in his pot",^[1] or "I want every ploughman in my kingdom to be able to put the chicken in the pot on Sunday."

Fench history retains the myth that King Henry IV (1553–1610), born at the Château de Pau in Béarn, said around 1600 to Duke Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy^[2][3] (or to his minister Maximilien de Béthune (Duke of Sully), according to the historian Jacques Bourgeat[n 1],[3]):

"If God grants me more life, I will ensure that there is no plowman in my kingdom who does not have a hen in his pot." This phrase only appears in a text in 1661, when Hardouin de Péréfixe wrote the History of King Henry the Great for Louis XIV.^[4]

After several decades of destructive and ruinous Wars of Religion between Huguenot Protestants and Catholics, he aspired to restore prosperity to the Kingdom of France and its subjects. He was assassinated in 1610 in Paris by François Ravaillac. Poule au pot (chicken in the pot) was the subject of many epigrams launched against the successors of the Béarnais.^[5]

At the dawn of the French Revolution, people sang:

"Finally, the hen in the pot will be put in the pot, At least we can presume so, For, for the two hundred years it has been promised to us, We have never stopped plucking it."

King Louis XVIII innovated at the time of the Restoration, considering that Henry IV had promised the fowl on the French table every Sunday, according to another formula attributed to Henry IV: "I want every farmer in my kingdom to be able to put the hen in the pot on Sundays."^[6][7]