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Chicken Maryland
Cut two fine, small spring chickens of one and a quarter pounds each into five pieces each. Place them on a plate, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Then roll the pieces in a little flour, lightly immerse in beaten-up egg and then roll lightly in bread crumbs. Heat in a frying pan three tablespoons melted lard, add the chicken and fry for eight minutes on each side, or until a nice golden colour. Then place the pan in a slack oven for fifteen minutes. Pour a cream sauce in the centre of a hot dish. Dress the chicken over the sauce in crown shape. Arrange six thin slices fresh broiled bacon on top of the chicken and, lastly, place six freshly prepared crisp corn fritters around the dish and serve.
A straightforward pan-fry finished in the oven, but two details need translation: the birds are far smaller than anything sold today, and the recipe assumes you already know how to make cream sauce and corn fritters.
- "Slack oven"A cool oven, roughly 250-300F by modern reckoning, the cooling tail end of a wood or coal range. The term was never standardised. Presumably it finishes the interior without darkening the crumb coating further.
- Spring chickensA 1 1/4 lb bird is roughly a poussin, and the 8-minutes-per-side timing depends on that size. The recipe gives no serving count; the six bacon slices and six fritters suggest it was dressed for more than a couple of eaters. Standard supermarket chickens run 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 lb; jointed pieces from one of those need noticeably longer in the oven, and thick breast pieces are better halved.
- Cut into five piecesThe recipe does not say how. A likely division for a small bird is two legs (drumstick and thigh left joined), two wings with a shoulder of breast attached, and the breast in one piece. Modern eight-piece jointing works too.
- DonenessJudge by temperature, not by clock: 165F at the thickest part of the thigh, juices running clear. A small bird may be there before the fifteen oven minutes are up.
- Fat quantityThree tablespoons of lard in a modern wide skillet gives a shallow film and uneven browning. Enough fat to come a third of the way up the pieces gives a better crust; lard, or a neutral oil, both work.
- Cream sauceLeft unspecified by the recipe. A standard version is a white roux of equal butter and flour loosened with cream or milk, seasoned with salt and white pepper, simmered until it coats a spoon. Make enough to pool in the centre of the dish and hold the pieces.
- Corn frittersAlso assumed knowledge — a thick batter of corn kernels, egg, flour and milk, fried in spoonfuls until crisp. Make them last so they arrive hot; they collapse quickly.
- Assembly"Crown shape" means the pieces leaned upright against each other in a ring, sauce pooled inside, bacon over the top, fritters around the rim. It only works on a warmed platter with the sauce thick enough to hold.
Chicken Maryland belongs to the older American tradition of fried chicken served with cream gravy, and at some point it was absorbed into hotel and restaurant French cooking as poulet \which is how it reaches an international collection like this one. The garnish is the giveaway: bacon and corn fritters, plus sometimes fried banana or a tomato, became the fixed international signature of the dish, repeated in continental kitchens long after any connection to household cooking in Maryland had faded. Escoffier codified a version in the Guide Culinaire of 1903, which did much to keep the name in European menus through the twentieth century. Note that this is not the deep-fried chicken of later American practice — it is crumbed, shallow-fried and oven-finished, closer to a cutlet in technique, and the cream sauce is served under rather than over the bird.