Chicken a la Marengo

There is an absolute glut of Italian cook books out and about, ooh a bit of tomato,mozzarella and pasta and you have a light and nutritious lunch! Yum yum! Yeah and it's all along the same lines, which is when I saw " Not only spaghetti!" in a charity shop my first thought was 'No shit!'

It was written by 'a family cook in Italy' in 1980 so you know there's probably a Mafiosi connection! Exciting stuff.

The recipe is for a dish that was allegedly a favorite of Napoleon, he first 'visited' Italy a few days after his wedding to old Josephine, but you know, on his own.

I'm cooking at the boyfriend's this time as a kind of a romantic gesture. I explained to him that my old mate Bonaparte had pretty plain tastes and this isn’t going to be necessarily conducive to any particular amorous pursuits - more like a big bit of gristle. He was game and even volunteered to sponsor the purchase of the Madeira that his recipe requires. Supermarket own brand £2 sherry would have been just as good (probably), but now we're stuck with a nice bottle of Duke of Clarence Rich Madeira.

This thing is called Chicken a la Marengo and is truly fit for... an Emperor of the French. Seriously, this requires the use of three separate pans to prepare something that consists of 4 main ingredients. No thank you. I used dried mushrooms because i though they would have more of a concentrated flavour, instead of soaking and frying them I just soaked them and added them to the chicken later. There are no measurements in this recipe, it's probably meant for fairly experienced cooks who know exactly what measurement 'add dry white wine' refers to. I confess, I wasn't 100% sure and thus the resulting chicken bath.

I then took the chicken out to create the sauce (ignore the lumps of flour - all cats look the same in the dark) before combining all the ingredients for a final few minutes.

Result: I love Napoleon. Local boy done good, 'A throne is just a bench covered in velvet' and all that stuff... He famously had pretty basic, peasant tastes and maybe that's the reason this dish looks and tastes a bit like a plate of mud. I'm not sure what the Emperor would have as a side dish in Italy, but I've decided to serve it with Rigatoni. The chicken is pretty much fried chicken with an earthy, warm flavour of mushrooms and Madeira. It's thick because of the flour but still feels really light, I found it delicious. I would make it again maybe to use up the rest of the Madeira, however I would balk at using almost half a bottle of wine for cooking instead of drinking ;)