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POULET (a la Marengo)
Cut up a large fowl into neat joints. Put these side by side into a stewpan with a little pepper and salt, a piece of garlic the size of a pea, two shallots, a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a bay-leaf, and four table-spoonfuls of salad-oil. Move them about until they are nicely browned. Lift them out, and keep them hot. Dredge an ounce of flour into the oil, and stir until it is quite smooth. Add a pint of nicely-flavoured stock, and stir the sauce over the fire until it is sufficiently thick to coat the spoon, remembering not to skim the fat from the sauce. Put in the pieces of chicken, and let them get quite hot, but the sauce must not boil after they are added. Serve on a hot dish, and strain the sauce over the pieces of chicken. Garnish with fried bread and eggs fried in oil. Time to fry the chicken in the oil, half an hour. Probable cost of chicken, 2s. 6d. to 3s. 6d. Sufficient for two persons.
A workable French braise once you translate the Victorian shorthand. The main thing to watch is doneness: the recipe browns the joints in oil and then forbids the sauce to boil, so the bird has to be fully cooked before it goes back in.
- Cook the chicken through firstHalf an hour in oil over gentle heat is meant to cook the joints, not just colour them. Check the thickest part of the thigh reaches 74C/165F before you lift the pieces out, since the finished sauce is only brought to a bare simmer.
- Salad-oilIn nineteenth-century usage "salad-oil" generally meant olive oil, though other bland oils were sold under the name. A mild oil rather than a peppery extra-virgin suits it. Four tablespoons is right for a heavy pan; the fat is deliberately left in the sauce at the end.
- A large fowlA Victorian fowl was an older laying hen, tougher and more flavourful than a modern broiler. Use a 1.5-2 kg (3.5-4.5 lb) chicken jointed into eight, or a boiling fowl if you can get one, in which case it will want an hour of gentle simmering rather than thirty minutes.
- Garlic the size of a peaThat is a fragment, not a clove: roughly a quarter of a modern clove, crushed. The quantity here is tiny by modern standards, and two shallots carry most of the aromatic weight.
- The flour and stockAn ounce of flour is about 3 tablespoons, and a pint here is an imperial pint, 570 ml / just under 2.5 cups. Let the flour cook in the oil for a minute or two before the stock goes in or the sauce will taste raw.
- StrainingNote the order of operations: the joints go on the dish and the sauce is strained over them, leaving the parsley stalks, thyme, bay and shallot behind. Tie the herbs in a bundle to make this painless.
- The garnish"Fried bread" means croutons or triangles of bread crisped in oil; the eggs are specified as fried in oil rather than butter. The recipe does not say how many. Fry them last so they are still soft-yolked at the table.
- YieldThe book gives two persons for a whole fowl, a small yield by modern reckoning. As a single main course this would feed three to four.
Chicken Marengo is named for the battle of Marengo, fought in Piedmont in June 1800, and is traditionally credited to Napoleon's cook Dunand, who is said to have improvised a dish from whatever the foragers found: a chicken, oil rather than butter, garlic, eggs and crayfish. The story is repeated everywhere and documented nowhere, and cooking historians generally treat it as legend attached after the fact to a fashionable name. What survives of the tale in the recipes themselves is the shape of the dish - olive oil instead of butter, garlic, an unskimmed sauce, and the fried egg and fried bread garnish that Cassell's still insists on here. Its presence in a Victorian English dictionary of cookery shows how thoroughly French restaurant names had been absorbed into middle-class household cooking, priced to the shilling for a cook working to a budget.