It consists of fried chicken served hot, with sauce chasseur, which is based on mushrooms, onions or shallots, tomatoes and wine, and may also contain stock and various herbs.

In The Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson writes that the phrase, meaning 'huntsmen-style', occurs in many languages: "Italians say alla cacciatora, Poles say bigos and the French chasseur."

[2] The Dictionnaire de l'Académie française dates the term chasseur to the 12th century; the dictionary refers to its culinary use, but does not give any indication of when it was first used in that context.

[1] In 1865, Bailey's Magazine recorded a dish of poulet à la chasseur served in a Parisian restaurant and costing the equivalent of half a guinea a head.

[4] In Le Figaro in 1870, Eugène Morand recorded a lunch eaten by a group of army officers at which—after two types of sausage, York and Bayonne ham, fried eggs, fillet steak, and macaroni with Parmesan—they concluded the savoury part of the meal with poulet à la chasseur[5] ("Ah!