Skip to main content
Main

Chicken a LA Marengo

A chicken stew thickened with flour and flavored with shallots, garlic, parsley, thyme, and bay leaf.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Chicken a LA Marengo

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the chicken as for fricassee.

Cook

  1. In a stew pan, heat olive oil and add chicken pieces, shallots, salt, bay leaf, pepper, garlic, parsley, and thyme.

  2. Fry for 25 minutes or until the chicken is tender, then remove from the pan and keep warm.

  3. Mix flour with a little cold water to form a paste, then stir it into the broth.

  4. Cook for 10 minutes, then pour the broth over the chicken and serve without skimming.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Shallot + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,476 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main protein, which turns tender and juicy as it simmers and fries in the pan.
Shallots
Soften and sweeten as they cook, adding a mild savoury base to the broth.
Flour
Mixed with water and stirred into the broth, it thickens the liquid into a light sauce.
Olive oil
Carries the heat and helps the chicken and aromatics brown and cook evenly.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour paste into the broth. Flour lumps if added dry or without first being smoothed into a paste with cold water. Whisking it into a smooth slurry lets it disperse evenly so it thickens the broth smoothly rather than clumping.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, olive, shallot, pepper, garlic, parsley, thyme):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Rosemaryfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, olive, shallot, pepper, garlic, parsley, thyme. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipesChicken PanadaChicken Panada75 recipes