Today we are going to make a chicken dinner!
This is Chicken Baked In Milk!
AuthorRetroRuth
From Sunset Kitchen Cabinet Recipes Vol II, Submitted by Mrs. E.W.E., Modesto, CA
Tested Recipe!
[cooked-sharing]
"My mother always cooked chicken this way, and guests never failed to ask how it was prepared, and how such delicious gravy resulted. It is really very simple."
"Prepare and cut up a 5 pound chicken as for frying, and brown the pieces well in a frying pan, using a mixture of butter and shortening. Season with salt and pepper while frying. When nicely browned, pour in enough sweet milk to half-cover the chicken. Cover the pan tightly and bake in a 350-degree oven for about 2 hours, or until the milk has all been absorbed and the chicken is very tender. Turn the pieces once while baking. When done, remove the chicken to a hot platter, add flour to the fat and juices remaining in the pan, and stir over low heat for a few minutes; then add milk and cook, stirring constantly, until smoothly thickened. Season to taste and let cook slowly 10 minutes longer before serving."
Cut up a whole fryer or use already cut chicken with the bones in and skin on.
Put 3 tablespoons of shortening or oil and 3 tablespoons of salted butter into a frying pan. Heat until hot and then brown the chicken pieces well on all sides, being careful not to burn it.
Transfer to an oven-safe dish if needed. Make sure to pour the fat from the bottom of the frying pan and all the brown fried bits into the oven-safe dish. Season with salt and pepper. Pour whole milk into pan, filling until the chicken is about half-covered. This will be about a cup of milk, or more if you are using a larger pan.
Cover tightly with foil or a lid and bake in a 350-degree oven for two hours, or until you can twist and remove the leg bone from the chicken leg.
Remove chicken from the pan, and strain the remaining juices. If there isn't enough in the pan drippings/juice to make at least two cups, add milk until it is two cups.
Take fat from the oven-safe pan and heat it on the stove in a saucepan until hot. Add enough flour to make a medium-thick roux (about four tablespoons of fat to four tablespoons of flour). Cook roux for a few minutes, and then slowly add the two cups of juices/liquid while whisking the roux. Cook, stirring constantly until the juices thicken to a gravy.
Ingredients
Directions
"My mother always cooked chicken this way, and guests never failed to ask how it was prepared, and how such delicious gravy resulted. It is really very simple."
"Prepare and cut up a 5 pound chicken as for frying, and brown the pieces well in a frying pan, using a mixture of butter and shortening. Season with salt and pepper while frying. When nicely browned, pour in enough sweet milk to half-cover the chicken. Cover the pan tightly and bake in a 350-degree oven for about 2 hours, or until the milk has all been absorbed and the chicken is very tender. Turn the pieces once while baking. When done, remove the chicken to a hot platter, add flour to the fat and juices remaining in the pan, and stir over low heat for a few minutes; then add milk and cook, stirring constantly, until smoothly thickened. Season to taste and let cook slowly 10 minutes longer before serving."
Cut up a whole fryer or use already cut chicken with the bones in and skin on.
Put 3 tablespoons of shortening or oil and 3 tablespoons of salted butter into a frying pan. Heat until hot and then brown the chicken pieces well on all sides, being careful not to burn it.
Transfer to an oven-safe dish if needed. Make sure to pour the fat from the bottom of the frying pan and all the brown fried bits into the oven-safe dish. Season with salt and pepper. Pour whole milk into pan, filling until the chicken is about half-covered. This will be about a cup of milk, or more if you are using a larger pan.
Cover tightly with foil or a lid and bake in a 350-degree oven for two hours, or until you can twist and remove the leg bone from the chicken leg.
Remove chicken from the pan, and strain the remaining juices. If there isn't enough in the pan drippings/juice to make at least two cups, add milk until it is two cups.
Take fat from the oven-safe pan and heat it on the stove in a saucepan until hot. Add enough flour to make a medium-thick roux (about four tablespoons of fat to four tablespoons of flour). Cook roux for a few minutes, and then slowly add the two cups of juices/liquid while whisking the roux. Cook, stirring constantly until the juices thicken to a gravy.
Notes
First, a quick shout out to the lovely patrons of my Patreon page. Thanks to them, the blog, recipe archive, newsletters, and social media channels are advertisement free! I am so grateful that 100% of the support now comes from them! And in exchange for pitching in, I let them decide what we are going to torture Tom with about every other week. This time they were merciful and picked something straight-forward. I think everyone was very interested to see how this turned out!
Given the Covid situation in Michigan, I am still getting my groceries delivered. The stores were out of whole chickens, so the service brought me two bone-in skin-on chicken breast halves and four leg/thigh quarters. I wasn’t about to complain. It totaled about eight pounds of chicken, and I left the skin on and the bones in. I felt that was how it was most likely prepared in the 1930’s, when this recipe was submitted to Sunset magazine.
For those of you who don’t know, Sunset magazine was more of a West Coast magazine. Their recipes tend to differ from the Midwest recipes that I usually find in my stash, where the biggest difference is in the produce and meats. This recipe stuck out to me because it seemed like more of an East Coast or Midwest recipe than typical Sunset recipes.
Also, I immediately thought of Charlie from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, where the others force him to make an online dating profile, and his favorite food is “milk steak”. Which I am pretty sure is made up. But I have been on the hunt for a recipe that could even possibly be an edible version of “milk steak” since then.
Anyway, this was a refreshingly chatty and straightforward recipe, and reading it I feel like I would have gotten along well with Mrs. E.W.E or her mother. This is the kind of thing that I would have done. I am known in our family for just casting whatever is lying around into a pan and cooking it for dinner. And normally it turns out very well, so I do it often. In fact, Tom actually prefers those meals to the ones where I cook from a new recipe.
But I had a moment of fear when I took off the foil on this pan of chicken. I really did. Then I remembered that modern chicken is not nearly as tough as 1930’s chickens, and is also injected with saline solutions up the literal wahzoo before being packaged and sold to us.
And that modern milk (though it was whole milk from our local drive-thru dairy) is pasteurized and homogenized. So this wasn’t going to be exactly the same sort of result that E.W.E. was used to.
But that wasn’t going to stop me. I strained the juices from my two pans of chicken and was left with a healthy amount of drippings/milk leavings.
Yeah, there is.
So, I skimmed off a couple of tablespoons of fat and gamely cooked 1/4 cup of flour in it. I added the juices, and it almost instantly whisked into the silkiest, most glorious-looking gravy ever.
Loooooooook!
And it smelled amazing.
“Do it Tom! Do it!”
“This tastes like turkey.”
“What?”
“It tastes like Thanksgiving turkey. This doesn’t taste like a roast chicken at all.”
The Verdict: Turkey
Somehow, magic happened in the oven, and the chicken was transformed from bland into a well-flavored, deep-noted bird. It wasn’t quite as gamey as turkey, but as I took my first bite, I could see what Tom meant. The chicken had been imparted with a tang and a slight sweetness that tasted like we had been bringing it all day, not just chucking it in a pan and tossing milk over it. The gravy as well. It even livened instant (gasp) mashed potatoes. And the chicken itself was moist, not just the dark meat, but the white as well. It was a success. And as I looked at even my picky kid (TJ) scarfing it down, I realized that we had a new family favorite on our hands. Thank you Mrs. E.W.E.!
Success!
That actually looks good!
I was reflecting on the milky problem with the chicken recipe. My first thought was that it requires non-homogenized milk. Then I read it again. The recipe asks for adding sweet milk. I came to the conclusion that the recipe calls for condensed milk aka sweet milk rather than any type of wholemilk…
About those “milk steaks”…..could they perhaps be anything like this?
When I was a kid my mother used to cook thick slices of ham (about an inch and a half or two inches thick) in milk. I suppose you could call that a sort of ham steak. She slathered the top of the ham in yellow mustard and filled the baking pan with milk until it was even with the top edge of the ham. Unfortunately, I cannot say at what temperature she cooked it nor for how long. I’ve been Vegetarian for more than 30 years and Mother became Vegetarian, too, (both of us for medical reasons) so we just never cooked meat after that. However, what I can say is that I remember with pleasure how very good and how very tender those milk-cooked ham steaks were–maybe it sounds odd but the texture was smooth and silky. By the way, the resulting milk leftovers looked much like what is in your picture of the residue in your pan. Mother never attempted to make gravy with it but maybe it would have been good on biscuits. But I will never know as I am Vegetarian for life.
This sounds delicious and I can’t wait to try it. Everyone I talk with is ready for Thanksgiving dinner right now, so this would be perfect. I think we need any reason we can find this year to eat drink and be merry. In fact I think our Christmas tree is going up and we will start celebrating New Year’s right after election day.
My aunt used to cook pork chops like this and once I got over how the cooked/split milk looked they tasted great. I bet steak would work too
I am now really curious about West Coast food of the 1930s!
That plate of food looks really, really good! I’m actually a little jealous of Tom.
I can’t tell you about the 1930’s but I would suggest hunting up a copy of Helen Evans Brown’s West Coast Cookbook. Helen Evans Brown wrote for Sunset magazine at that time and later was considered an expert in the regional fare of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Her book is a fascinating because there are comments and information on each recipe, and it does delve into historical dishes. Just for example, back before there were Mexican restaurants everywhere, Helen Brown explained how to make enchiladas and lots of other favorites. I got a copy of this book when I was a teen and have treasured it ever since. This book is how I learned to make a nearly-forgotten old-fashioned dish called Philpy (which I adore and make often) and it’s also how I learned how to make homemade corn chips (kinda like Fritos but baked) which also appear often at my house. The West Coast Cookbook may not be targeted at the 1930’s but I’m sure there are recipes in there that would have been used then.
There is always a first for everything!! 🙂
I have that cookbook and haven’t looked at in years. I’ll have to go back and take a fresh look at it. I also have the original Sunset cookbook. There are several great recipes in it. I never had heard of Philpy. Just looked it up and it sounds interesting. Do you just eat it plain or serve it with something?
I’d like to provide another alternative for “sweet milk”. This may have been written back in the day when buttermilk was more prominent, so “sweet milk” was what was used to denote what we just consider milk these days.
Although it is considered a bread, Philpy really isn’t bread-like; it’s an odd concoction. I usually have Philpy with a bit of cheese and some sliced tomato or salad. Sometimes I have it plain with a bit of salt. I eat it hot or cold. Since I make Philpy fairly often (at least once or twice a month), I’ve also varied the recipe by using whatever I have on hand or whatever herbs strike my fancy. Best Philpy I ever made included lemon basil, a bit of leftover spinach, and a generous dash of Parmesean. It’s a fun recipe to meddle with. Hope you give it a try!
Jamie Oliver has a recipe like this – chicken braised in milk , except his doesn’t make gravy at the end. It uses just regular milk. Old recipes called it sweet milk to differentiate it from sour or buttermilk – when my mother didn’t have any buttermilk for cornbread she would add a tablespoon of vinegar to regular milk and it worked fine.
Braising chicken or pork in milk (pollo or maiele ai latte) is an Italian thing, and it is in fact delicious.
Slightly off topic. My grandmother would make grapefruit and avocado salad (on the menu). I made it recently for a socially distanced gathering of five and it was a hit. Added a sprinkling of walnuts and used leafy greens, but Gram used iceberg lettuce. A bit of blue cheese would not be amiss either. Lovely to see this reference … brought back good memories.
Yum! This reminds me of Jamie Oliver’s chicken in milk recipe 🙂
Love your blog!
This is more famously known as “Maryland Chicken”, and it’s a very old recipe. I have it in an old “Culinary Arts” recipe book.
Thank you for this!!! I knew it wasn’t a West Coast recipe. 🙂 Which Culinary Arts book was it in? Those things are so packed with great recipes it is easy to overlook stuff. 🙂