Food Notes: 6/17

Mediterranean chicken, chicken florentine, spaghetti "Napolitan", hot dogs, giant lobsters and more.

Last week we end up on the playground after school, and one of the parents was bragging how they were having Mediterranean Chicken for dinner. Their partner loved cooking Martha Stewart’s recipe, a simple roasted chicken with olives, tomatoes and capers.

The thing with Mediterranean Chicken is that there are many different recipes with the same name. For me, I thought of a chicken braised in a creamy, spinach and roasted red pepper sauce — sometimes called Chicken Florentine or Tuscan Chicken. There’s something about this dish that triggers that mid-1990s nostalgia.

Martha’s Mediterranean Chicken is an updated version of a 20th century recipe. Looking back through newspaper archives, there’s numerous variations of Mediterranean Chicken with similar flavor profiles as Martha’s. I found a recipe from 1956 in the Herald and News of Oregon that combines olives, artichoke hearts, and tomato paste. A similar recipe pops up in 1975 in the Ottawa Journal, but adds potatoes. What’s interesting about these recipes is the reliance on tomato paste rather than fresh tomatoes, and canned pantry items like artichoke hearts. That’s a very mid-century way of cooking.

Canned tomatoes eventually make it into Mediterranean chicken recipes in by the 1990s. Curiously, despite the sun-dried tomato craze, I didn’t come across many recipes that suggested using them.

Perhaps this is why Martha Stewart is such an icon today. He Mediterranean Chicken essentially re-imagines this pantry-item recipe with fresh tomatoes, roasted in a very modern presentation. The fresh roasted tomatoes bring that umami punch that made roasted feta and tomatoes such a viral hit a few years back. And Martha’s recipe is simple. The prep time is just a few minutes, and then 18 to 20 minutes roasting in the oven.

But we had just eaten roasted feta and tomatoes earlier in the week, and cooking up a similar variation with chicken seemed a bit redundant. Besides, I was looking for creamier dish. My cursory search for creamy Mediterranean chicken brought up a few different recipes from Kylee Cooks, Downshiftology, and Delish. I looked over each one and then threw the recipes out the window.

The main take away was I wanted the flavor of roasted red peppers and the creaminess of cream cheese. I always feel ashamed of using cream cheese in a sauce, but I never regret the results. Mushrooms were on sale, so I grabbed some of those too, and we had left over spinach. I cooked the vegetables with a bit of shallot, added some broth, and then added the chicken back in before melting the cream cheese into the sauce.

It’s fair to point out what I’ve cooked up here is similar to what is sometimes called Chicken Florentine. America’s Test Kitchen called chicken Florentine a “buffet-line favorite” in a 2019. But like Mediterranean Chicken, there’s not a single definitive recipe.

A modern, recognizable chicken Florentine recipe ran as a Columbus Day advertisement special in the Hollywood, Florida Sun-Tattler in 1970. The recipe combines spinach and chicken with a cream sauce made from cream, milk, butter, and Swiss cheese. Another recipe from 1987 in the Index-Journal lists a chicken Florentine in a story “Entertaining with chicken.” This variation brings mushrooms to the party, along with parmigiana cheese and Worcestershire sauce. There are other variations on these, and of course, restaurants advertising chicken Florentine, but where did this dish come from?

Chicken Florentine, and indeed many other dishes made Florentine, have little to do with the city of Florence. A brief syndicated newspaper item from 1936 explains the origins. “Nancy Hart’s Home News,” explain why Florentine dishes suddenly appeared on menus, from mushrooms to artichokes, and eventually even chicken. Restaurants in New York City began attaching the term Florentine to refer to dishes prepared with spinach — “no vegetable is more essential to the spring diet,” Nancy Hart explained, “fortunately, the chefs know a great many ways to let us have our spinach rations pleasantly.” So it seems that Florentine dishes were just a mid-1930s marketing trick invented by New York’s restaurant scene.

I was happy with the flavor of the dish in the end. At added a touch of crushed red pepper so there was a hint of spice to the sauce—an addition most recipes featuring cream cheese will leave out. We served the chicken with roasted potatoes, which was good because the sauce had a bit more liquid than I wanted it too. I probably could have used less chicken broth, or simply let it cook down a bit more but we were hungry.

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