Chicken Marengo - déjá-vu?

This is the first of my recipes associated with Le Tour de France and Gabriel Gaté. This is his last year of doing the Taste le Tour segment and it turns out he is just revisiting some of the highlights - for him anyway. These little segments talk in general about the food and wine of the region the tour is in at that moment and then present a recipe. This time though it doesn't seem that this will be the case, as the first recipe was Chicken Marengo which he presented back in the year that the tour started in Corsica - where Napoleon comes from. Well I guess it was the first day of the tour, though this year it was Brussels - so really he should have done moulds et frites, or chocolate or something. The recipe that you will find also has a video showing you how to make it. Very, very simple.

I am also worried that I have actually done this before. I did look back through my archives and couldn't find anything, so I am risking repeating myself. Mind you as I looked I found that I had repeated myself on a number of other occasions. Boring! Sorry.

Chicken Marengo is one of those unlikely legend dishes. Here is what Wikipedia says on the subject.

"According to a popular myth, the dish was first made after Napoleon defeated the Austrian army at the Battle of Marengo at Marengo south of Alessandria, Italy, when his chef Dunand foraged in the town for ingredients (because the supply wagons were too distant) and created the dish from what he could gather. According to this legend, Napoleon enjoyed the dish so much he had it served to him after every battle, and when Dunand was later better-supplied and substituted mushrooms for crayfish and added wine to the recipe, Napoleon refused to accept it, believing that a change would bring him bad luck.

This colorful story, however, is probably myth; Alan Davidson writes that there would have been no access to tomatoes at that time, and the first published recipe for the dish omits them. The more plausible explanation for the origin of the dish is that it was created by a restaurant chef to honor Napoleon's victory" Wikipedia

What spoilsports some of these food historians are. It's such a nice story. And interestingly, today, most of the recipes you find omit the crayfish and the egg. Alas Alan Davidson might be right about the tomatoes though. There was no canning industry back then, so the chef couldn't even have used tinned ones. Mind you there might have been bottled ones, and surely passata has been made since tomatoes took over Italian cooking. Really though it's a variation on chicken cacciatore or poulet provençale.

I did find a recipe in Taste.com which had prawns - but not the eggs. And it looked somewhat more complicated than Gabriel Gâté's version. But anyway give it a shot.

I have my own little 'origin' story to tell on this dish. Before we were married, my future husband invited me to dinner at his mother's flat, where I think he was living for a while - it wouldn't have been for long as the flat was tiny. And what he cooked was a version from Elizabeth David. Her version uses veal though. I cannot remember whether he used veal or chicken. Most likely he would have stuck exactly to the recipe because he, like me, would have been in the early stages of cooking prowess. He also went for what she claims is a traditional garnish of triangles of bread fried in oil. I thought it was gorgeous - and it probably was.

So Chicken Marengo has a special place in my heart.