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Chicken, Maryland Style
Clean and disjoint two spring chickens of medium size, leaving the breast whole. Put the neck and giblets into cold water and cook so as to obtain a cup of the stock for the gravy. Arrange the chicken in a pan being careful that no piece touches another. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and dot over with one-quarter cup of butter. Bake in a hot oven from one-half hour to forty minutes with onequarter cup of butter melted in one-quarter cup of hot water. Take up the chicken when done and make a gravy from the fat left in the pan, stirring in two tablespoons of flour, one cup of milk or cream and the cup of stock made from the giblets. Add, if convenient, a few button mushrooms. Serve the chicken with the gravy poured round it.
A baked version of the Maryland idea: young chicken, cream gravy, no batter. It works well provided you treat the two "quarter cups of butter" as separate quantities and watch the bird rather than the clock.
- Hot ovenPeriod usage generally puts a "hot oven" somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat a small bird browns while the flesh is still juicy, which is the whole point of the method.
- Spring chickensThese were young birds of about 1.5-2 lb each, roughly what a supermarket sells as a poussin or small broiler. Two of them serve four. One 3.5-4 lb chicken cut into eight will substitute, but add 15-20 minutes and expect the breast to be drier.
- Doneness, not timingHalf an hour to forty minutes is right for genuinely small birds. Go by an instant-read thermometer: 165F at the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone.
- Two lots of butterA quarter cup goes on the chicken in dots; a second quarter cup is melted into a quarter cup of hot water and poured into the pan. The water keeps the drippings from scorching at that temperature and gives you fat worth making gravy from.
- No piece touching anotherThis is the hinge. Crowded pieces steam instead of browning, and the flour dredge turns to paste. Use a large shallow pan, or two.
- Giblet stockCover neck, heart and gizzard with cold water and simmer 30-40 minutes for the cup of stock. Add the liver only in the last ten minutes or it turns bitter and grainy. Start this before the chicken goes in the oven.
- The gravyPour off all but about two tablespoons of fat, cook the flour in it a minute or two, then add the milk and stock gradually off the heat to avoid lumps. It should coat a spoon; thin with more stock if it tightens.
- Button mushrooms"if convenient" marks them as an optional extra, and canned or bottled mushrooms were the usual convenience form at the time. Fresh ones need sauteing in butter separately until their liquid has cooked off, then stirring into the finished gravy.
In American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "Maryland style" applied to chicken meant a young bird served with a cream gravy, and it appears baked and broiled as well as fried; the Butterick Publishing Company's cook book, issued to the same audience that bought its dress patterns, gives a plain form of it. The name is generally traced to Chesapeake practice, where small chickens and dairy cream were both abundant, and the dish became a fixture of hotel and railway dining rooms. It travelled oddly: by the interwar years European and British menus had fixed "Chicken Maryland" as a crumbed fried cutlet accompanied by banana and corn fritters, a version most Marylanders would not have recognised. "Spring chicken" is itself a period marker, from a time when hatching was seasonal and a tender young bird was a spring and early-summer luxury rather than a year-round staple.