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FOWL (a la Marengo)
Pour four table-spoonfuls of the best Lucca oil into a stewpan, and cut a fowl into pieces, which dredge with flour. Lay them into the stewpan and brown over a moderate fire, turning each piece, that all may be of a good colour. A pint of stock, or water, should now be added, with a piece of garlic about the size of a pea, a dozen and a half, or more, of small button-mushrooms, salt, pepper, and a tea-spoonful of sugar. Simmer gently for half an hour, and do not skim away the oil, but leave it floating on the sauce. When done, arrange the joints nicely on a dish, and reduce the sauce by boiling till it is sufficiently thick, then serve it over the fowl. Time, fifty minutes altogether. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A one-pan braise that stands or falls on the browning stage and on what bird you use. Cassell's fifty minutes suits a young chicken, not the mature fowl the name implies.
- The hinge: brown properly, then leave the oil aloneThe flour-dredged joints must take real colour before liquid goes in, or the finished sauce is pale and floury. The instruction not to skim is deliberate — the recipe wants the oil left floating on the reduced stock as part of the character of the dish.
- Lucca oilLucca, in Tuscany, was the byword for fine table olive oil in Victorian Britain, sold in tins by grocers. Use a good fruity extra-virgin olive oil; four tablespoons is about 60 ml.
- "A fowl"In Victorian usage a fowl often meant a mature hen, which would be leathery after thirty minutes of simmering. Use a 3 1/2 to 4 lb chicken cut into eight or ten pieces; if you genuinely have a boiling fowl, it needs an hour and a half or more.
- A pint of stockAn imperial pint, so 20 fl oz — about 2 1/2 US cups. Chicken stock gives a far better reduction than water.
- Garlic "the size of a pea"Roughly a quarter to a half of a modern clove, crushed. This is 19th-century English restraint; a whole clove or two is closer to how the dish is cooked in France and Italy today.
- MushroomsA dozen and a half or more small button mushrooms, left whole, stems trimmed. Add them with the stock as written and they will give up liquid into the sauce, which is part of the point.
- Doneness and finishingThigh joints should read 175F at the bone. Lift the chicken out, boil the sauce hard to a light coating consistency, taste for salt, and pour it over. The teaspoon of sugar should not read as sweet.
- ServingFour to five portions, as stated. Fried bread croutons or plain boiled rice catch the oily sauce well; the classic French version of the dish is traditionally garnished with a fried egg and a crayfish.
The name commemorates Marengo in Piedmont, where Napoleon's army fought the Austrians on 14 June 1800, and the dish is traditionally said to have been improvised for him after the battle by his cook Dunand from whatever the foragers found — chicken, oil, garlic, eggs, crayfish from a stream. The story is repeated everywhere and documented nowhere; what is certain is that by the mid-19th century poulet à la Marengo was a fixture of French restaurant cooking, which is how it reached an English household dictionary like Cassell's. This version is notably austere beside the French one, with no tomato, no wine and no brandy, and it reflects the book's use of a named dish to teach a method: dredge, brown in fat, moisten, simmer, reduce.