Being a personal chef can be a pretty sweet gig, especially here in L.A. If you work for a movie star (and movie stars love personal chefs) you probably spend the day swanning around the mansion, maybe doing a little hot-tubbing, while you wait for your client to come home so you can make dinner. Plus, when they fly off to Rome to make a movie, you go, too — and then you're swanning around a movie set instead. The only downside is that celebs can be a bit fussy. If they don't like the way you've spread the peanut butter on their sliced apple, things can get ugly.

Still, that's nothing compared with what personal chefs had to deal with a couple of hundred years ago. Instead of movie stars, they had A-list clients like Napoleon Bonaparte, and when they went on location in Italy they weren't shooting a movie, they were invading the country. On a gig like that, a good day meant not getting hit by a cannonball.

On what may be the roughest personal chef job ever, Napoleon's chef is said to have accompanied his boss across the Alps on a mule in the prelude to the Battle of Marengo in 1800. Later, famished after a long day of routing the Austrians, Napoleon wanted dinner. The chef managed to scrounge up a chicken, some tomatoes and a few other ingredients from the Northern Italian countryside, and Chicken Marengo was born. Bonaparte liked it so much that it became his lucky dish. Check out this updated version of the Chicken Marengo recipe. Napoleon was a pretty tough boss, so if it was good enough for him, it's bound to be pretty good.