Chicken Marengo

Chicken Marengo — poulet saute Marengo — is a French dish named for the Battle of Marengo, fought on the fourteenth of June 1800 near Alessandria, in Piedmont, in which Napoleon Bonaparte defeated the Austrian army. The popular legend credits his chef Dunand with improvising the dish after the victory, foraging for chickens, tomatoes, eggs, and crayfish from the surrounding countryside because the supply wagons had not yet arrived. Most culinary historians regard the story as apocryphal or heavily embellished: the specific combination — with its fried egg, its crayfish, and its use of tomatoes, which were still a novelty in French cooking at the time — reads more like a later romantic construction than a field-kitchen improvisation. Nineteenth-century cookbook recipes vary considerably. The dish, however named, became a classic of the French repertoire and remains strongly associated with Napoleon's legend.

Chicken Marengo arrives as sauteed chicken pieces in a glossy, tomato-based sauce with mushrooms and onions, garnished — classically — with a fried egg and a crayfish or two. The sauce is savory and slightly tangy from the tomatoes, with a depth from the browned chicken; the fried egg and crayfish are eccentric garnishes that mark the dish's battlefield-legend origin. Eaten hot, with bread to mop the sauce.

Chicken Marengo rests on pan-frying and a tomato-based pan sauce. Chicken pieces are seasoned, dredged in flour, and pan-fried to develop Maillard browning; the fond — the browned juices left in the pan — becomes the foundation of the sauce. Tomatoes, an acidic New-World ingredient novel to early-nineteenth-century French cooking, are sweated with garlic, onions, and mushrooms; deglazed with white wine or brandy, the whole reduces into a savory, slightly tangy sauce that coats the chicken. The eccentric garnishes — a fried egg and crayfish — are the elements the legend attributes to battlefield forage; in modern practice they are often omitted, leaving the chicken-in-tomato-and-mushroom core.