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Chicken a LA Marengo

A chicken dish cooked with oil, onions, herbs, mushrooms, lemon juice or tomato purée, served with croutons and optional crayfish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Chicken a LA Marengo

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the chicken

  1. Heat the oil in a pan and test it with a crust of bread.

  2. Sauté the chicken joints in the oil, adding the legs first for 5 minutes.

  3. Add the chopped onions and herbs, cooking until the chicken is light brown.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Drain off excess oil and prepare a sauce with mushrooms and lemon juice or tomato purée.

  2. Arrange the chicken on a serving dish, placing the delicate pieces on top.

  3. Surround with croutons and crayfish if available.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Mushroom + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,719 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Parsley + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,398 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked by browning in oil until golden.
Oil
Conducts heat for browning the chicken and carries flavour through the pan.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, adding savoury depth to the sauce base.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and moisture to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the chicken.
Tomato purée
Adds concentrated tomato flavour and body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the chicken joints. Browning in hot oil creates colour and savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pieces crowded or cooked in oil that is not hot enough will steam and turn pale instead.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, parsley, mushroom, lemon, tomato, crayfish):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, parsley, mushroom, lemon, tomato, crayfish. 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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