Veterans Day and Chicken Marengo

On this Veterans Day, I bypassed the free meals many restaurants offer to veterans and instead made my favorite Veterans’ Day feast: Chicken Marengo.

Chicken Marengo illustrates one of the best qualities of servicemen everywhere: the ability to improvise, adapt and overcome. It’s also a really good dinner. The legend is that the dish was invented by Napoleon’s personal chef after the Battle of Marengo in 1800.

Napoleon was pursuing the Austrian army across northern Italy and won a stunning victory near the village of Marengo. But the army had advanced so rapidly that its baggage train was left far behind. This was a problem for Napoleon’s chef because he had nothing to cook. He also had a hungry general, because Napoleon’s habit was to fast before and during a battle (which probably gave him better odds of surviving a stomach wound).

So the chef improvised. He liberated a chicken and scrounged up some mushrooms, tomatoes, wine and spices. (The original version also included crayfish and an egg, we are told.) The resulting dish became Napoleon’s favorite.

Individual initiative and ingenuity has become the hallmark of generations of American servicemen, from the junior officers and noncoms who led shattered troops off the Normandy beaches on D-Day to the soldiers who attached homemade armor to their Humvees in Iraq.

When I was on active duty in the Navy, an elaborate barter system overcame a dysfunctional supply system that inevitably produced a shortage of things we needed and a surplus of things we didn’t. So sailors swapped plexiglass for spray paint, and then traded the spray paint for the radio parts they needed in the first place.

The unwritten rule was that enlisted men did the bartering. My job as an officer was to turn a blind eye to midnight requisitions and shield my men from discipline on the rare occasions when they were caught. So when I conducted an inventory aboard ship in Japan, I was pleased to learn that my petty officers had swapped several bags of coffee for a broken-down radar languishing in the shipyard and then stripped it for parts. Their secret was safe with me.

A port visit to Hong Kong was an opportunity to sell scrap brass and use the proceeds to get the ship painted. So the night before we left our home port, the boatswain’s mates would collect scrap brass – defined as any material on or near the pier that was not nailed down. The captain approved of this but, of course, knew nothing about it.

The ship’s cook was an expert at improvisation. Our tiny minesweeper was at sea for two months at a time with limited access to fresh ingredients, but the food was so good I gained a few pounds.  The cook baked wonderful bread with powdered milk and powdered eggs, and modified the recipe when the flour came from Australia rather than the Philippines.

Chicken Marengo was never on the menu, but I’ll bet our cook could have created a reasonable facsimile with powdered ingredients and whatever mystery meat emerged from the Navy supply system.