After scouring a representative sample of Italian restaurant menus across the country, the tenth most common item is one that has become a favorite for home cooks, children, and Italian-American chain restaurants, chicken parmesan. And many more, to be fair. There was a piece a few years about Ken Auletta, the longtime New Yorker writer who has had an obsession in finding excellent chicken parmesan preparations, and part of a group of guys who have been foraging the Italian-American eateries of the New York area for years in search of quality versions. For Auletta, a “test of a good Southern Italian restaurant is whether their chicken or veal parmigiana had a good sauce, the breading is crisp and has not been drowned in sauce, and the chicken or veal is not so thin it tastes like cardboard.”
Chicken parmesan is an American creation that grew from the eggplant parmigiana preparation from southern Italy and Sicily, with the meatier chicken substituting for the less caloric eggplant at its core. Veal parmesan came first, at least by the 1930s while chicken parmesan debuted on restaurant menus at least a couple of decades later. Veal parmesan is certainly a much better dish – though the version at the venerable Ralph’s near the Italian Market in Philadelphia last fall was disappointing – and my favorite dish as a kid. But chicken parmesan is ubiquitous throughout the country, the veal version much less so. Industrially produced, widely distributed, easily affordable, and easy to cook with, abnormally large, if typically fairly tasteless, chicken breasts provide the key reason for the popularity of chicken parmesan. The dish at restaurant is a chicken breast or two – rarely pounded very thin – breaded and pan-fried, sometimes baked, and topped with mozzarella and maybe some other Italian-inspired cheeses and melted in an oven, and served in a tomato sauce usually with a side of pasta, likely spaghetti, also in that tomato sauce. You know what it is. And even longtime New Yorkers and Italian-Americans like Ken Auletta might really like it if done well.
In case you are curious, among the fifteen most popular Italian-American chains, the average price of chicken parmesan just about $23.50. The chicken parm index.
Chicken parmesan is an American creation that grew from the eggplant parmigiana preparation from southern Italy and Sicily, with the meatier chicken substituting for the less caloric eggplant at its core. Veal parmesan came first, at least by the 1930s while chicken parmesan debuted on restaurant menus at least a couple of decades later. Veal parmesan is certainly a much better dish – though the version at the venerable Ralph’s near the Italian Market in Philadelphia last fall was disappointing – and my favorite dish as a kid. But chicken parmesan is ubiquitous throughout the country, the veal version much less so. Industrially produced, widely distributed, easily affordable, and easy to cook with, abnormally large, if typically fairly tasteless, chicken breasts provide the key reason for the popularity of chicken parmesan. The dish at restaurant is a chicken breast or two – rarely pounded very thin – breaded and pan-fried, sometimes baked, and topped with mozzarella and maybe some other Italian-inspired cheeses and melted in an oven, and served in a tomato sauce usually with a side of pasta, likely spaghetti, also in that tomato sauce. You know what it is. And even longtime New Yorkers and Italian-Americans like Ken Auletta might really like it if done well.
In case you are curious, among the fifteen most popular Italian-American chains, the average price of chicken parmesan just about $23.50. The chicken parm index.
RSS Feed
