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Fried Chicken, Baltimore
Singe, cut head and feet off a two-and-a-half-pound tender chicken, draw, neatly wipe and cut it into twelve equal pieces. Place on a plate, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, turn well in seasoning, lightly roll in flour, shake off superfluous flour, then dip in beaten egg and lightly roll in fine bread crumbs. Thoroughly heat two tablespoons melted butter in a sautoir, add chicken pieces one beside another and gently fry for eight minutes on each side, set in oven for ten minutes, then remove to oven door. Pour Madeira sauce on a hot dish, then nicely dress chicken over and arrange the twelve Baltimore fritters around. Broil six thin slices ham for one minute on each side, place ham over chicken and serve.
A restaurant-style version of chicken Maryland: breaded joints, a wine sauce, corn fritters and ham. It assumes you have the fritters and the Madeira sauce already made, and it assumes a cook who can judge a pan.
- The hinge: don't cook it three timesEight minutes a side in the pan plus ten in the oven will dry out breast pieces from a small bird. Brown the pieces well, then finish in a 375F oven only until the thickest part of the thigh reads 165F — usually 10 to 15 minutes total in the oven for dark meat, less for white. Pull breast pieces early and hold them warm.
- SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan, not the sloped skillet. Any heavy 12-inch pan works; the point is that the twelve pieces sit flat in one layer without touching.
- Two tablespoons butter is not enoughBreadcrumbs drink fat. Use 4 to 6 tablespoons of clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, and add more if the crumbs look dry and patchy. Whole butter alone will scorch before the chicken browns.
- "Draw" and "singe"Eviscerating and burning off pinfeathers over a flame. A supermarket chicken arrives done; buy a 2.5 to 3 lb bird and joint it yourself into twelve — two drumsticks, two thighs, two wings, and each breast half cut in three.
- "Remove to oven door"An old range instruction, most likely meaning the chicken was set at the mouth of the oven, or on the open door, to keep warm without cooking further. Hold the chicken uncovered on a rack in a 200F oven so the crust stays crisp.
- The two missing recipesMadeira sauce is a brown sauce (demi-glace) reduced with Madeira; a jarred demi-glace loosened with stock and a splash of Madeira is a fair stand-in. "Baltimore fritters" are almost certainly the corn fritters that usually travel with this dish -- sweetcorn in a light batter, fried in small spoonfuls.
- The hamThe recipe says only "thin slices ham," broiled one minute a side; that timing suits a thin dry-cured ham. Prosciutto or a thin-cut cured ham crisps in that time; a wet-cured sandwich ham will only weep.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a 2.5 lb bird in twelve pieces, with six slices of ham and twelve fritters, will stretch to four to six.
This is the dish that nineteenth-century American cooks and European chefs both called Maryland chicken — jointed young chicken, egged and crumbed, fried, and sent out with corn fritters and a slice of ham or bacon. Its origins are generally traced to Chesapeake home cooking, where a spring chicken fried in a pan and served with cream gravy was standard, and the version here shows what happened when hotel kitchens took it up: the pan gravy is replaced by a Madeira sauce, the pieces are counted out to exactly twelve, and the fritters are "dressed" around the platter. Escoffier's Guide Culinaire carries the dish as poulet sauté Maryland, which may be why it turns up in a book organized as a world tour of cooking rather than in the American chapter alone; by the early twentieth century it was among the handful of United States dishes with a settled place in the international restaurant repertoire.