Engagement Chicken: A History of Romantic Culinary Bullshit
We’re just six weeks short of Thanksgiving, which means two things: First, if your Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year plans involve air travel, book your ticket now or suffer the financial consequences. Secondly, if you’re looking to get hitched over the holidays and believe in magic, it might be time to bust out the Engagement Chicken.
The stretch between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day has come to be known as engagement season, a time when the calendar presents us with a slew of special occasions on which your paramour could pop the big question. Jewelry companies know this all too well; before you even sit down to your turkey dinner, you’ll be hearing about how he went to Jared. The wedding industrial complex will continue the recruitment for months.
If you’re dying to get a ring during this sentimental stretch and willing to do any batshit thing in order to make it happen, then surely you’ll want to cook your sweetheart some Engagement Chicken, a legendary dish said to inspire men to propose to the women who serve it. Getting it on the table now is the considerate move — you’ll give your beloved a good six weeks to get his act together just in time to pop the question on a Hallmark-perfect holiday.
The Engagement Chicken speaks to two things that many women understand: the desire to enter a contractual arrangement in which you’ll file joint tax returns with a man, and poultry. If you’re the type to Google “how to get him to propose,” you are perhaps already familiar with the Engagement Chicken (or as I like to call it, chicken). The dish hit critical mass in 2011 when Glamour magazine released a cookbook entitled 100 Recipes Every Woman Should Know: Engagement Chicken and 99 Other Fabulous Dishes to Get You Everything You Want in Life.
And what, pray tell, would a woman cook in order to live the life of her dreams? Here are a few examples:
- Skinny Jeans Scallops
- He Stayed Over Omelet
- Forget the Mistake You Made at Work Margarita
- Engagement Chicken
- Let’s Make a Baby Pasta
- Bribe a Kid Brownies
(There are 93 other recipes in the book, but these six highlights nicely outline a life plan for Everywoman: be thin, get laid, have a job, get married, have a kid, raise the kid. In that order.)
The Engagement Chicken is the real star, though, and the cookbook put the dish front and center. But the (in)famous fowl has reportedly been around for decades. As Glamour tells it, fashion editor Kim Bonnell gave the recipe to her assistant, Kathy Suder, sometime in the ’80s; Suder made it for her boyfriend, and he proposed shortly thereafter. Like magic. Word spread of this romantic voodoo, the recipe made the rounds around the Glamour office, and three more Glamour staffers got engaged after preparing the same roast chicken.
In 2008, Bonnell herself described the phenomenon:
It’s like this: 104 years ago, when I was an editor at Glamour magazine, I’d often overhear assistants worryingly discuss what to cook for the boyfriend-coming-over-for-dinner moment in their romances. […] I’d come across, and prepared, a really easy Marcella Hazan lemon roast chicken recipe. Its appeal for me was an amazingly crisp skin, but I also appreciated its ease, subtle flavors, and impressive presentation. I fiddled with the recipe to make it even more to my liking and after serving it on a couple of occasions to men, realized that it was guaranteed guy-friendly: familiar but different, fancier than everyday chicken but not off-puttingly strange or fussy. (Rule: Dishes with more ingredients than you can count on one hand are too much work for you and demand too much fawning from your guests.)
So this chicken popped into my head when assistants worried about their date-night menus, and I shared it with them, spelling out every teeny little step. Success! They’d report back the next morning about foolproof results and rave reviews.
And, it seemed, betrothals. Maybe not that very night but with unmistakably related-to-chicken timing. With an eerie predictability, women became engaged to the men for whom they prepared this chicken. Voila: Engagement Chicken.
Glamour ran the recipe in the magazine in January 2004, dubbed it the Engagement Chicken, and since then some 70 women have ensnared their dream dude by cooking him a bird.
