This is a story about a recipe that resulted in one of the most disappointing dinners I’ve ever made. And it’s sort of about engagements. It’s never a good thing when the two go hand in hand.
But before I tell you all about a recipe that, according to urban legend, has resulted in countless proposals and many happy bellies, let me back up a bit and also provide some context.
A few weeks ago, I was perusing my Google Reader when I came across this round-up post on Taylor’s blog It’s The Little Things. The post featured this cookbook cover, and I was immediately intrigued, for two reasons.
One, I’ve never known a recipe to get me everything I wanted in life. And two, what the heck is Engagement Chicken??? A quick Google search later and I found this:
First comes chicken, then comes marriage? Be skeptical if you must, but this recipe may be charmed. It all began 26 years ago, when then-Glamour fashion editor Kim Bonnell gave the recipe to her assistant, Kathy Suder, who made the chicken for her boyfriend, who, a month later, asked her to marry him. “It’s a meal your wife would make. It got me thinking,” says Jon Suder, who now has three children with Kathy. Details of the simple dish passed from assistant to assistant like a culinary chain letter. When Bonnell heard that her recipe had inspired three weddings, she dubbed it Engagement Chicken.
This sounded completely ridiculous. The comments on the recipe post were even better (my absolute favorite: “I made it Sunday night for my date, and followed it up with a delicious chocolate cake with fudge sauce and whip [sic] cream. He took me to see Chicago and Earth, Wind & Fire. Then we had a fabulous time at home on his very nice mattress! He even made me pancakes for breakfast! I sure hope we end up together forever because we had a great time, I adore him, and he lets me drive his [P]orsche.”).
So after I scoffed a lot at the recipe and went on a minor rant about it at work, my friend Meredith calmly suggested that it could be great blog fodder. She’s a genius, that one.
“What if it works,” I asked her, “and Joe proposes in like 3 weeks or something?”
“That would be funny. Also, you’d never be able to tell anyone that Engagement Chicken actually worked.”
And she’s right, I NEVER WOULD.
Fast forward to two Fridays ago. I often make chicken for dinner on Sundays anyway, so I told Joe, “This weekend I’m going to make this recipe I found from Glamour magazine. It’s called engagement chicken. Supposedly it’s so good, men take one bite and are convinced to propose to their girlfriends.”
He grunted a lot, but managed not to drive the car off the road.
“Can we skip all that and I’ll just tell you now that your regular chicken will be better?”
“You’re sweet, baby. But no. The Internet needs to know whether or not this recipe has any merit.”
Forget chicken. As you can see, open communication and flattery are probably the true secrets to a lasting relationship.
Before I had even started, I must confess I was extremely skeptical of this dish. The recipe calls for a 4 lb chicken to be stuffed with halved lemons, drowned in pure lemon juice, then seasoned prodigiously with a tablespoon of salt and a bit of black pepper. That’s it. The end. Oh, and also, you’re supposed to cook it breast side down for 15 minutes in a barely-375 degree oven, then flip it on its back and “roast” at 350 until it’s ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY DEGREES coming out of the oven. In case you didn’t know, 180 degree chicken meat is dry. Real dry.
But I thought that maybe I was missing something. Did the breast-side down method create some kind of quick-caramelization of the skin that I couldn’t conceive of? Did the acidity in the 1/2 a cup of lemon juice — to be poured over the chicken and into the roasting pan — tenderize the meat in some weird way?
Here’s what I found:
I began, as instructed, by dousing the chicken with 1/2 a cup of lemon juice. Though the recipe doesn’t mention it, you’ll need around two lemons to procure this volume of juice. I pre-mixed 1 tablespoon of sea salt and 1/2 a teaspoon of freshly ground pepper, and sprinkled this all over the bird. Here’s where things already began to go awry.
I’ve been cooking since I was 7, and I know better than anyone that a recipe should always be treated as a guideline. I immediately felt like the amount of salt suggested was WAY too much, even after seasoning the cavity and the entire exterior of the bird. I didn’t use all the salt and pepper, but had only maybe 1/4 teaspoon of the mixture left. In the end, I should’ve omitted more.
I poked holes in another two lemons using a fork, sliced them in half, and shoved as many as could fit into the cavity of the bird (for my bird, it was 1.5 lemons total). The recipe doesn’t specify on trussing the bird (and I normally don’t either), but this bird looked so limp and sad in its un-trussed state and the lemons were sticking out of it in a very unappetizing manner. Maybe this is where I went wrong, but I trussed that sucker.
Also, as you can tell, I didn’t use a traditional roasting pan for this recipe. I always roast chickens in a 14″ stainless steel All-Clad. Exact same (if not better) results as a regular roasting pan.
Next, as instructed, I flipped the bird breast side down. And it all just felt wrong, wrong, wrong.
The recipe has you heat the oven to 375, then as soon as you put the bird in, you lower it to 350. Then, 15 minutes later (as if that does anything), you flip the bird over on its back. To me, 350 is the temperature to bake cookies — NOT to roast. And sure enough, after about 50 minutes, the chicken came out looking like this:
So sad. Hardly any color. Parts of the skin that had been over seasoned looked like a salt lick. The temperature in the thigh at this point was 145. I had no intention of roasting the chicken to 180 (I roast to about 155 or 160, and aim for a finished temp of around 165). You guys, looking at this picture, this is truly the saddest little roasted chicken I think I’ve ever made.
I poured olive oil over the breast and legs to try and amp up the browning during its final minutes in the oven. Not part of the recipe.
Straight out of the oven, I also added a bit of thyme to the bird, because (contrary to what the recipe suggests), serving it with raw herbs doesn’t really do anything for me. If you sprinkle a bit of herbage on top of a hot bird and let it sit while it rests, it retains its vibrant green color, but still wilts and becomes aromatic. And it makes photos of your finished product look slightly more appetizing.
The recipe is adamant in its suggestion to pour the juices from the roasting pan on top of the sliced chicken— “this is the ‘marry me juice,’” it claims, the secret weapon to getting any man to put a ring on it. To be honest, it was mostly just a salty, acidic mess.
Okay, so this chicken was not inedible. But it wasn’t good. My five recommendations for a better roasted chicken, whether you’re trying to get engaged or not:
1. Never stuff anything in the cavity. Short of perfuming your kitchen, it doesn’t really add any flavor to the chicken. Instead, it slows cooking time, since there’s no hot air circulating inside the cavity of the bird.
2. If you like crisp skin, never pour liquid of any kind into a roasting pan or onto/into your bird. The best way to get shatteringly crisp chicken skin is to prevent steam in the oven. I seen it!
3. Trust your instincts when seasoning. If it seems like too much salt, it probably is. If the pan juices look too greasy, they probably are.
4. If you want to infuse the meat with a particular flavor, try brining. You can also try making a simple compound butter (mix together 1 stick of butter, salt, pepper, and finely minced herbs), then smear underneath the skin of the chicken. The skin won’t be as crisp if you do this, but you’ll get some added flavor from the melted butter oozing all over the cooked meat.
5. The less time your chicken is in the oven, the better. I’m convinced that the longer it’s in there, the more it’s just drying out. This isn’t a pork shoulder. When it comes to chicken, nothing should be “slow-roasted.”
Whew. So that’s the story of my engagement. With engagement chicken. Sorry this post got a little long. File it under one of my classic food rants.
Have any of you heard of engagement chicken before? Do you know of anyone who’s made it and resulted in its intended outcome?
{Image Credit: See.Shop.Eat.Do.}
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