Skip to main content
Main

Chicken a LA Marengo

Chicken simmered in a sauce of butter, onions, mushrooms, garlic, walnut, tomato, milk, sherry, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Chicken a LA Marengo

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Singe and draw the chicken.

  2. Cut it as you would for a fricassee.

  3. Dust the chicken with salt and pepper. Rub in the thyme and nutmeg.

  4. Place the chicken in a frying basket and plunge it into deep hot fat. Cook slowly for 15 minutes.

  5. Drain.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter. Add the chopped onion, mushrooms, garlic, and pickled walnut. Cook for 3 minutes.

  2. Dust the mixture with flour. Mix well.

  3. Add the strained tomato, milk, and ⅓ cup of water. Cover and cook slowly for 45 minutes.

  4. Add the sherry.

Serve

  1. Serve the chicken in a pyramid form, garnished with fried eggs.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Chicken + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-butyl acetate (fruity, banana).

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

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Chicken + garlictop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,850 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-ethyl-2,5-dimethylpyrazine (roasted, nutty).

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; frying and then slow cooking keep the meat tender and juicy.
Butter
Carries the aromatics and adds richness to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and liquids.
Strained tomato
Adds acidity and body, giving the sauce its color and tangy flavor.
Milk
Adds moisture and creaminess, softening the sharpness of the tomato.
Sherry
Adds a fragrant, slightly sweet and acidic depth to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the sauce slowly, covered, for 45 minutes. Milk and flour can scorch or split if the heat is too high, and a gentle covered simmer lets the flour fully thicken the sauce and the flavors blend smoothly.

Swap the walnut

The recipe marks walnut as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, onion, mushroom, clove, garlic, butter, flour):

  1. Cashew nutfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Sesamefits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, onion, mushroom, clove, garlic, butter, flour. 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesChicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipes