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Chicken a La Maryland
Cut up chicken as for fricassee. Dip in egg and bread crumbs. Bake in oven, adding small amount of water and basting frequently. Fifteen minutes before removing from oven, add 2 cups cream or milk, and simmer gently. Remove chicken, and thicken liquid. 1 chicken onion 1 tablespoon parsley
The method here is a baked version of what was usually a pan-fried dish, and like most Metropolitan Life booklet recipes it assumes the cook already knows the shape of the thing. The ingredient list at the end is incomplete as printed — the onion and parsley are never mentioned in the instructions.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Bake at 375F; the coating browns without the water in the pan boiling away too fast.
- "Cut up as for fricassee"Eight to ten pieces: two drumsticks, two thighs, two wings, the breast split in two or four, and the back cut across. A 3 to 3 1/2 lb bird is the right size.
- The onion and parsleyNeither is placed by the instructions; the likeliest reading is that both belong to the sauce rather than the coating. Put the sliced onion in the pan with the water so it flavours the drippings, and stir the chopped parsley into the finished gravy off the heat.
- Coating that stays onDip in beaten egg, then crumbs, and let the pieces sit fifteen minutes before baking. Egg-and-crumb coatings sheet off wet skin, so pat the chicken dry first and season it before the egg.
- Basting a crumbed birdFrequent basting with the pan liquid will soften the crust. Baste sparingly, or brush with melted butter instead and spoon pan juices over only at the end.
- The cream stageTwo cups is generous and will not reduce much in fifteen minutes. Add it warm, keep the oven at a bare simmer, and do not let it boil hard or it will break.
- Thickening the liquidWork flour into an equal weight of soft butter and beat that into the simmering cream a little at a time, or use a slurry of flour and cold milk; two cups of liquid needs considerably more than a tablespoon of flour to give a gravy any body. Cook two or three minutes after it thickens to lose the raw flour taste.
- Doneness and yieldTotal baking time runs 50 to 60 minutes; thighs should read 175F and breast 165F. One bird as cut serves four.
Chicken "a la Maryland" was one of the most-copied American restaurant dishes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: chicken in pieces, floured or crumbed, cooked in fat and served with a cream gravy, often with corn fritters and bacon alongside. The name is generally traced to the Chesapeake habit of serving fried chicken with a milk gravy made in the pan, and it traveled far from Maryland — Escoffier gives a version, and it stayed on British menus for decades as "Chicken Maryland" long after Americans had stopped using the phrase. The oven treatment here reflects the priorities of the book it appears in: the Metropolitan Cook Book was distributed free by an insurance company to policyholders, and its recipes lean toward methods that need less fat, less watching and less skill than a skillet full of hot lard. A whole chicken was still an occasion, and the cream gravy existed partly to stretch it.