Chicken Marengo

History

Artusi opens by retelling the familiar tale: on the evening of the Battle of Marengo (June 1800), with the cooking wagons lost, the First Consul's cook improvised a dish from foraged hens that supposedly became a Napoleonic favourite. Artusi himself hedges it — "si dice," it is said — and modern food historians treat the battlefield origin as apocryphal. Andrew Uffindell notes that the cook usually credited, Dunand, was not yet in Napoleon's service in 1800, and that the dish's classic ingredients were not available around Marengo at the time; he reads the association as part of a wider myth encouraged by later Napoleonic "spin." Alan Davidson likewise observes there was no access to tomatoes then, and that the earliest published recipe omits them. The likelier story is that a Paris restaurant cook named the dish to honour the victory. The "classic" French version — chicken sauteed with garlic and tomato, garnished with fried eggs and crayfish — was itself unstable, later shedding the eggs and shellfish and gaining mushrooms, olives and wine. Against that backdrop Artusi's version is strikingly plain: chicken browned in butter and oil, floured, finished with white wine, broth, nutmeg and parsley and a squeeze of lemon — no tomato, crayfish or egg at all.

Ingredients

• young chicken
• g butter
• tbsp olive oil
• nutmeg
• tbsp flour
• dl white wine
• broth
• chopped parsley
• lemon
• salt and pepper

Instructions

1. Cut a young chicken (no neck or feet) into large joint pieces and brown them in a sauté pan with 30 g butter and a spoonful of oil, seasoned with salt, pepper and nutmeg.
2. Pour off the fat, then add a level spoonful of flour and a deciliter of white wine.
3. Add broth and cook covered over low heat until done.
4. Garnish with chopped parsley and squeeze half a lemon over it at serving.