The rotisserie chicken — sold hot from the rotating spit at French market stalls since the medieval period — became the foundational convenience food of the postwar French kitchen. When Édouard Leclerc opened his first self-service supermarket in Landerneau, Brittany, in 1949, one of his first innovations was the in-store rotisserie, which allowed working families to purchase a fully cooked chicken on the way home and build an entire dinner around it in minutes.
The French concept of cuisine du marché — market cooking, built from whatever is freshest and most available that day — was perfectly suited to this new convenience. The rotisserie chicken became the protein anchor around which the cook would construct something that appeared effortlessly composed: shredded into pasta with the zucchini from the kitchen garden, finished with cream and whatever fresh herb was growing by the back door. Tarragon was the herb of Provence. Dill was the herb of the north. Either worked, because the rotisserie chicken was the point.
The one-pot pasta technique — cooking the orzo directly in broth and wine so it absorbs the liquid and thickens it with its own starch — is a specifically Italian contribution to this French tradition, the kind of cross-cultural synthesis that happens naturally along culinary borders where no one is paying much attention to national categories. The result is a dish that belongs to no single tradition and tastes better for it.