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Poulet a LA Marengo

Poulet à la Maringo is a chicken dish simmered in a mushroom and flour sauce with sugar, garlic, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and garlic are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,700 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Poulet a LA Marengo

Ingredients

Directions

Brown and simmer

  1. In a stewpan, heat the salad oil over medium heat.

  2. Add the fowl pieces and brown them.

  3. Once browned, sprinkle in the flour and stir.

  4. Pour in the stock or water and let it simmer slowly for about 1 hour, skimming off fat as it rises.

  5. Add the mushrooms, season with salt, pepper, garlic, and sugar.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the fowl and arrange it on a serving dish with the larger pieces at the bottom.

  2. Reduce the sauce by boiling it quickly, stirring until it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon.

  3. Pour the sauce over the fowl and serve.

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. Mushroom + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,700 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + garlictop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Provides the main meat, which browns and then becomes tender during the long simmer.
Salad oil
Conducts heat for browning the fowl and adds richness to the pieces.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a sauce that clings to the chicken.
Stock or water
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and keeps the fowl moist as it simmers.
Mushroom buttons
Add earthy flavor and body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Reducing the sauce. Boiling quickly thickens the sauce by evaporating water, while the flour has already started to thicken it. Stirring prevents scorching and lumps, and the sauce is ready when it coats the back of a spoon.

Swap the garlic

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, mushroom, pepper, sugar):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, mushroom, pepper, sugar. 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.

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