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Chicken à la Merango
Dress, clean, and cut up a chicken. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and sauté in salt pork fat. Put in a stewpan, cover with sauce, and cook slowly until chicken is tender. Add one-half can mushroons cut in quarters, and cook five minutes. Arrange chicken on serving dish and pour around sauce; garnish with parsley. 1/4 cup butter
A brief entry that assumes you already have a brown sauce on the stove and a whole bird to break down. The text as printed here trails off into the first line of an ingredient list, which is worth understanding before you start.
- The missing sauce"Cover with sauce" is never explained, and the stray "1/4 cup butter" at the end of the entry looks like the first line of an ingredient list that the page does not carry further. A brown sauce — butter and flour cooked to a brown roux, let down with brown stock, seasoned and strained — is the likely intention. Have a good brown sauce or thickened chicken stock ready before the chicken comes out of the pan.
- "Dress and clean"Nineteenth-century shorthand for plucking, singeing and drawing a bird that arrived whole; the jointing is the separate "cut up." Buy a 3 1/2 to 4 lb chicken cut into eight pieces and skip straight to seasoning.
- Salt pork fatDice 2-3 oz of salt pork and render it slowly, then fry the floured chicken in the fat. Bacon fat is the nearest common substitute; plain oil works but loses the cured, salty note the dish was built on.
- Cook slowlyNo time is given. Browned chicken pieces braised at a bare simmer, covered, need about 30-40 minutes; breast pieces will be done nearer 25 and can be lifted out early. Dark meat is ready at about 175F, well past the 165F minimum, and is better for it.
- Half a can of mushroomsCanned mushrooms of the period came in several sizes, so "half a can" is a rough measure at best; something around 4 oz drained is a fair reading. Fresh button mushrooms, quartered and sautéed separately in butter, are a straight improvement; five minutes in the sauce is enough for either.
- Dredge with flourShake the pieces well after flouring. Excess flour in the pan burns in the pork fat and will darken the sauce past pleasant into bitter.
- YieldOne chicken with its sauce serves four, with rice, boiled potatoes or toast points to take the sauce.
Chicken Marengo — the spelling here is the book's own — is traditionally traced to the aftermath of the Battle of Marengo in June 1800, where Napoleon's cook is said to have improvised a dish from a scavenged chicken, oil, tomato and crayfish. The story is repeated everywhere and documented nowhere near the event, and the crayfish and fried egg that garnish the classic French version have quietly fallen away by the time the dish reaches this book. What remains is a competent brown-sauce fricassee with canned mushrooms: the pedigree was kept, the difficult garnishes were dropped, and the tin opener did the rest.