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Chicken a la Marengo
1 3-lb. chicken 6 mushrooms sliced 1/2 cup stewed tomatoes 1 small onion minced A few truffles 1/2 cup Brown Sauce 1 teaspoon salt Clean and dress and cut the chicken in small joints; dry it carefully and fry to a good brown in olive oil or butter. Place in a braiser with seasonings and vegetables, cover closely and simmer half an hour, adding more water as it boils away. Serve on a chafing-dish. Garnish with croutons of puff paste and poached eggs.
A short, workable braise once you know what the period vocabulary means. The garnish is not decoration but part of the dish's identity, and the brown sauce is the only ingredient that takes real work.
- BraiserA heavy lidded pan used on the stovetop, not the oven dish sold today under that name. A Dutch oven or any wide pot with a tight lid does the job.
- Brown SauceIn books of this period this is usually a brown roux moistened with brown stock and simmered down; it may or may not be the full sauce espagnole. A half cup of good reduced chicken or veal stock thickened with a little beurre manie is a fair stand-in; commercial demi-glace concentrate also works.
- "Clean and dress"Assumes a bird arriving with feathers, feet and innards. Buy a 3 to 3 1/2 lb chicken and cut it into eight or ten pieces, joints separated so they lie flat in the pan.
- Drying the chickenThe instruction to dry it carefully is the hinge. Damp skin steams instead of browning, and the fond from that browning is most of the flavor in a sauce this small.
- Thirty minutesRight for legs and thighs; breast pieces will be dry by then. Add the breast after about twelve minutes, or pull it at 160F and return it to the pan at the end.
- Truffles"A few truffles" would have meant tinned black truffles, a luxury flavouring used sparingly. Omit them, or use a little truffle-scented oil off the heat. Cultivated cremini or a few dried porcini, soaked and chopped, give more useful depth for the money.
- Stewed tomatoesHalf a cup of stewed tomatoes, home-cooked or canned, broken up with their juice. The recipe has you add water only as it boils away, so keep the additions small if you want a sauce rather than a stew.
- Serving"Serve on a chafing-dish" simply means to keep it hot at the table. Croutons of puff paste are small baked rounds of puff pastry; one poached egg per person, set on top at the last moment. Serves four.
The name comes from the Battle of Marengo, June 1800, and the dish is traditionally credited to Napoleon's cook Dunand, said to have improvised a chicken with whatever the countryside offered after the baggage train went missing. That version is a kitchen legend rather than documented fact, but it explains the odd fixed garnishes: the classic restaurant Marengo carries a fried egg and crayfish, relics of the story's scavenged supper. By the time an American flour company printed this in its promotional cook book, the crayfish had gone, the egg had become poached, and the garnish had been reduced to puff-paste croutons.