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Maryland Chicken
Dress, clean, and cut up two young chickens. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip in flour, egg, and soft crumbs, place in a well-greased dripping-pan, and bake thirty minutes in a hot oven, basting after first five minutes of cooking with one-third cup melted butter. Arrange on platter and pour over two cups Cream Sauce.
Fannie Farmer's version is an oven method rather than the skillet-fried Maryland chicken of Southern cookbooks, and it works well provided the birds are small and the crumbs are genuinely soft.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no degrees; a hot oven is conventionally read today as somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat the crumb coating sets and colors before the meat dries, which is the whole point of the short bake.
- Two young chickensProbably broilers of a pound and a half to two pounds each; the recipe says only "cut up" and does not specify how many pieces. A modern 3.5-4 lb roaster cut up will not cook through in thirty minutes; use two of the smallest birds you can find, or thighs and breast halves of even thickness.
- Check temperature, not the clockThirty minutes is right for small pieces only. Dark meat should read 175F at the bone, breast 165F. This is the one place the original timing can mislead you.
- Order of the coating"Flour, egg, and soft crumbs" is the sequence: dry flour first so the egg has something to grip, then crumbs. Soft crumbs are torn from the interior of a day-old loaf, not dried and rolled; they brown faster and softer than packaged crumbs.
- BastingOne-third cup melted butter, added after the first five minutes so the crumbs have time to set. Spoon rather than brush, or you will drag the coating off.
- Cream SauceFarmer's Cream Sauce elsewhere in the book is a white sauce of the milk-or-thin-cream type, thickened with roughly equal butter and flour and seasoned with salt and pepper; check her own sauce chapter for the exact proportions. Two cups is a generous amount; make it while the chicken bakes and keep it covered.
- Dripping-panA shallow roasting pan. Grease it well and leave space between the pieces, since crowding steams the crumbs instead of crisping them.
- YieldTwo small birds serve four to six. Serve at once; the coating softens under the sauce within a few minutes.
Maryland chicken as it appears in nineteenth-century American cookbooks is young chicken, coated and cooked quickly, served with a cream gravy, and the dish is generally traced to Chesapeake practice where spring broilers were plentiful. Older Southern versions fry the pieces in fat in a skillet and build the gravy from the pan drippings; Farmer, writing for the Boston Cooking School and for cooks with reliable ranges, converts it to an oven method with butter basting and her standard Cream Sauce, which is characteristic of how she systematized regional dishes into a single interchangeable set of techniques and sauces. The name traveled further than the recipe: "chicken Maryland" turned up on European and Australian hotel menus for decades afterward, often with fried banana and bacon attached, garnishes associated with the Escoffier-era restaurant treatment rather than with the American home versions.