Skip to main content
Main

Poulet a LA Marengo

A French chicken dish simmered with stock, mushrooms, garlic, and sugar, finished with a reduced sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 braise

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

  2. Add the fowl pieces and brown them.

  3. Once browned, sprinkle in the flour and cook until brown.

  4. Pour in the stock or water and let it simmer slowly for about 1 hour, skimming off the 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 pyramidically on a serving dish, with the smaller joints 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 becomes tender during the long slow simmer.
Flour
Browns with the fat and thickens the stock into a coating sauce.
Salad oil
Carries heat for browning the fowl and adds a rich fat base.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and body to the sauce as they cook in the stock.
Stock or water
Forms the liquid that simmers the fowl and becomes the sauce.

The step that matters

Reducing the sauce. Boiling the sauce quickly thickens it by evaporating water, so it coats a spoon. Boiling too long can make it overly salty or dense, while too little leaves it thin and watery.

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.

You might also like

Mushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes