How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun (5 page)

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Chicken Marengo: Broken supply line

This popular Italian dish gets its name from a battle in the town of Marengo, just south of Turin. Its inspiration: the famed Napoleon Bonaparte. The great general was elected France’s first consul in February 1800 (effectively becoming the leader of the new republic) and was itching to show his might. To that end, his audacious plan was to cross the Alps, enter Italy and overtake the Austrian army. When the two opposing forces engaged on June 14, 1800, things initially looked bad for Napoleon and his men. One of his trusted lieutenants, General Louis Desaix, reportedly told his leader, “This battle is completely lost, but it is only two o’clock; there is time to win another.” Though Desaix didn’t survive the day, he was right, as the French rallied to prevail at what was dubbed the Battle of Marengo.

Following the clash, Napoleon was well famished. This wasn’t surprising as the Corsican had a habit of never eating before a battle. The future monarch’s Swiss chef, Dunand, was well aware that his boss was going to want something particularly pleasing after the hard-fought victory. Unfortunately, the typical standbys were going to be impossible to make because the food wagons had been lost during the battle.

Dunand hurriedly sent out soldiers from the quartermaster’s staff to forage for supplies. All they could get, according to author Patricia Bunning Stevens, were “three small eggs, four tomatoes, six crayfish, a small hen, a little garlic, and some oil.” The chef took the hodgepodge and went to work. He presented Napoleon with sliced chicken browned in oil and flavored with garlic, along with tomatoes, fried eggs, and crayfish on a tin plate. (It’s also said by some that a soldier’s ration of bread was toasted and added. Others claim it’s unlikely that tomatoes were a part of the original dish.) As amazing as the military triumph was, equally surprising was Napoleon’s love for the unplanned fare. The first consul supposedly told Dunand, “You must feed me like this after every battle.”

Versions of this story have been told in such respected publications as
The Oxford Companion to Food
and
Larousse Gastronomique.
Still, not everyone is a believer. Stevens concedes that the tale is “plausible” but argues “[t]he dish is sheer legend.” She points to the fact that Napoleon’s private secretary noted in his memoirs that food for that fated meal was supplied by a local convent and that the French received an “abundance of good provisions and wine.” (It’s worth noting that even if the convent offered lots of food, it could have included the strange combination that forced Dunand to create his funky combo.)

Stevens posits that the story of the dish was a marketing ploy by an unnamed restaurateur who thought a good anecdote would draw more buyers. Whatever the case, the dish itself was one of Napoleon’s favorites and may very well have been one he savored his whole life. Even when exiled on St. Helena in his final years, Napoleon was said to have talked often about his great victory at Marengo. He was even buried in the grey overcoat he wore on the day of the battle. As for chicken Marengo, it’s outlived the iconic French leader—with some changes. The pan-fried chicken is now often cooked in a white wine sauce, crayfish are rarely served as part of the dish, and mushrooms are a popular addition.

Chicken Tikka Masala: Fussy customer

Forget such evocatively named English dishes as
bangers and mash
or
bubble and squeak
. The United Kingdom’s national food is Indian. “Having a curry” (as it’s called there) is so popular that Scotland’s
Daily Record
newspaper once put the annual spending on Indian food in the United Kingdom at more than four billion dollars.

With that context, it’s no wonder that the British take great pride in their contribution to the cuisine. So much so that a member of Parliament once went so far as to ask the European Union to designate one famed Indian dish, Chicken Tikka Masala, as a Scottish creation. It didn’t matter that the dish’s creator merely stumbled upon it.

Ali Ahmed Asham was a chef at Glasgow’s Shish Mahal restaurant in the 1970s. He’d been dealing with a stomach ulcer, according to the
Daily Record,
when one night a customer came in for Chicken Tikka. Asham cooked up the meal, but the patron was not satisfied. He complained that the meat was too dry. An exasperated Asham had a can of Campbell’s tomato soup he’d kept on hand to deal with his stomach malady. He opened it up, added some spices (some say he had already added the spices for his benefit), and sent the chicken out again, but this time with his new sauce. Years after the incident, Asham told a variation on the story minus the drama: “[O]ne day a customer said, ‘I’d take some sauce with that, this is a bit dry’ so we cooked Chicken Tikka with the sauce, which contains [yogurt], cream, and spices.”

Either way, it was a flavorful combo—and one that probably each of the nine thousand curry houses across the United Kingdom serves regularly. To recognize the momentous discovery, Glaswegian member of Parliament Mohammad Sarwar sprung into action in 2009. He made a motion in the British House of Commons regarding “the culinary masterpiece that is Chicken Tikka Masala.” Noting that it was “Britain’s most popular curry” he asked that his fellow representatives rally around Asham and push the European Union to designate Glasgow as an “EU Protected Designation of Origin” for the dish.

Needless to say Indians didn’t like the idea of tomato soup getting acclaim for such a cornerstone option on curry menus.

Zaeemuddin Ahmad, a chef from Delhi’s Karim Hotel, maintained that the dish was his family’s recipe. “Chicken Tikka Masala is an authentic Mughlai recipe prepared by our forefathers who were royal chefs in the Mughal period,” he told Britain’s
Daily Telegraph
. “Mughals were avid trekkers and used to spend months altogether in jungles and far off places. They liked roasted form of chicken with spices.”

Rahul Verma, an expert on Delhi street food, offered a different opinion, saying the dish was introduced in the Indian region of Punjab in the 1970s. Though he didn’t buy Asham’s claim, he believed that the dish wasn’t by design. “It’s basically a Punjabi dish not more than 40 to 50 years old [as of 2009] and must be an accidental discovery which has had periodical improvisation,” he said.

While one of those Indian antecedents may very well be true, it’s still very possible that the meal Asham produced for his persnickety customer was the one that spawned the Chicken Tikka Masala revolution in Great Britain. As for Britain’s leadership, they weren’t ready to get behind the cause. Sarwar’s effort didn’t sit well enough with his colleagues to lead to a formal request to the European Union. In the end only nineteen members of Parliament signed on to his motion.

Chimichanga: Fryer slip-up

The fryer has brought joy to so many cultures around the globe (think french fries or, if you’re more adventurous, Scotland’s deep-fried haggis). Of course Mexican food has its fair share of deep-fried delicacies with one of its most popular being the chimichanga. Yet despite the cuisine’s penchant for greasy fare, this entry into the bubbling goodness was pure happenstance.

For those of you with a weak stomach or limited exposure to the chimichanga, it’s effectively a deep-fried burrito—and it’s the pride and joy of Tucson, Arizona. A pioneering woman named Monica Flin is widely regarded as the inventor of the dish. Flin, the daughter of a French émigré, opened Tucson’s El Charro Café in 1922. Not only was Flin one of the only female restaurant owners in the southern Arizona town, she also practically did it all at the establishment—cooking, serving as hostess, and waiting tables. Throw in the fact that she often had a handful of nieces and nephews hanging around the café, and it’s clear that Flin was one busy woman.

One day Flin was in the midst of frying ground beef for tacos. With so much going on, she mistakenly knocked a burrito into the fryer. Her initial reaction was anger and the trilingual woman (she spoke French, Spanish, and English) was on the verge of dishing a popular Spanish “Ch” swear word to express her displeasure. (I’m guessing it was the F-word, Spanish style.) Looking around at some of the children in the kitchen she caught herself at the last moment and blurted out “chimichanga,” which translates roughly to the Spanish version of
thingamajig
. As the restaurant’s menu says today, “Thankfully for all of us, Monica was a controlled and creative cuss.”

The dish, which was once dubbed one of America’s top fifty plates by
USA Today
, does have others who claim to be its inventor. Some historians suggest that local Native American tribes or Mexicans on the Sonoran border were frying up burrito-esque meals long before Flin’s discovery. George Jacob, owner of another Tucson restaurant called Club 21, said he produced the first fried burrito when a traveler from the east found the traditional type too blah. Jacob slathered it with shortening and used the grill to brown it. The pan-fried creation immediately went on his menu. As Jacob’s restaurant didn’t open until 1946, it’s likely that if he decided the fried burrito was menu worthy, he did so after Flin’s folly. Plus, Jacob’s original dish wasn’t dunked in the deep-fryer. To this day, El Charro still exists with Flin’s great-grandniece Carlotta Flores continuing the tradition. She has made a few changes; most notably, lard has been replaced with canola oil in the fryer.

If Flin’s story seems familiar to some Midwesterners, it’s probably because St. Louis’s popular toasted ravioli—deep-fried, meat-filled pasta sprinkled with herbs and grated parmesan cheese—has a similar origin. The most common story about its birth sets the invention’s discovery sometime between the 1930s and 1950s at a restaurant called Oldani’s in the Italian area of St. Louis known as The Hill. One of the restaurant’s cooks, Fritz (history only gives us his first name), mistakenly deep-fried a batch of ravioli when he thought a pot of hot oil was water. A variation has him simply knocking the ravioli into the oil accidentally. No matter, the tale proves that, as was the case with the chimichanga, good things can happen when food falls into the fryer.

Fettuccine Alfredo: Finicky new mom

For a chef, there may be no greater indignity than an inability to get your spouse to eat your cooking. This was the ignominy that Alfredo di Lelio was facing circa 1914. Now, di Lelio, who ran a fine restaurant in Rome called Trattoria Alfredo, did have a major factor working against him. His wife, Ines, had just given birth to a baby and the whole affair had completely ruined her appetite.

“It was a hell of a life,” di Lelio was once quoted as saying. “Work all day and rock the baby at night. I had to do something.”