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Chicken Saute, a LA Marengo

A sautéed chicken dish with flour, oil, and optional vinegar, sugar, olives or onions, cooked in its own juices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and olive are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,888 recipes. Both carry acetic acid hexyl ester, which smells sweet, green. The science ↓

Chicken Saute, a LA Marengo

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Cut the chicken into pieces: start with the wings, then the legs, and finally the breast, removing the entrails.

  2. Save the heart, liver, and gizzard, removing any unwanted parts.

Braise

  1. Place all chicken pieces in a saucepan with salad oil and brown them.

  2. Add flour and stir until everything is browned.

  3. Cover with hot water and season with salt and pepper.

  4. If too salty, balance with a little vinegar and sugar.

  5. If desired, add olives or button onions when adding water.

  6. Stir with a flat wooden stick to avoid scratching the pan.

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. Chicken + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,888 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid hexyl ester (sweet, green).

  2. Vinegar + olivetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,297 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  3. Pepper + olivetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,263 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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 and meaty body of the dish, and its fat helps the pieces brown.
Salad oil
Conducts heat for browning the chicken pieces and keeps them from sticking to the pan.
Flour
Browns with the chicken and thickens the cooking liquid into a light sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the chicken with flour. Browning the pieces well before adding water builds the deep colour and savoury flavour of the sauce. Stirring the flour in while it browns helps it toast evenly without scorching, and the flour then thickens the liquid.

“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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