Marry Me Chicken Vs Engagement Chicken: What's The Difference?

TikTok just might be the best thing that ever happened to the world of home cooking ... and also the worst. From promoting a dangerous tequila cocktail hack to ignoring the tuberculosis risk of drinking raw milk, the platform has turned people on to some really bad ideas, but then again, there's the marry me chicken trend, and that alone makes everything alright. In case you somehow missed it, marry me chicken is a dish that first went viral on social media in 2022, becoming the third-most Googled recipe of that year (per GoogleTrends). The hype hasn't died down since, with TikTok recipe videos for marry me chicken regularly accruing hundreds of thousands or even millions of views.

It's hard to ignore a dish with such a catchy name. The idea of a meal so tasty that whoever you serve it to will drop down on one knee and whip out a ring has turned marry me chicken into a Valentine's Day favorite. But it's not the first food to make this kind of promise in its name. The 2000s saw the rise of a dish with a strikingly similar name, engagement chicken. However, before you go thinking that marry me chicken is just a rip-off of this predecessor, you should know that the two dishes are almost nothing alike. In actuality, marry me chicken was inspired by something completely different.

The story of engagement chicken begins in 1982 at the offices of Glamour magazine. As the tale goes, one of the magazine's editors gave her assistant a recipe for roasted chicken. The assistant went home and cooked the dish for her boyfriend, and one month later, the fellow proposed. This assistant then passed the recipe on to other staffers, who prepared it for their boyfriends, and were all proposed to shortly thereafter.

The recipe for engagement chicken wasn't actually published in Glamour until 2004. Ina Garten of "Barefoot Contessa" fame also put out a recipe after learning about the dish from a friend at Glamour. Both versions are for a whole roasted chicken, stuffed with lemon and garlic, and served with the roasting juices poured all over the meat to make a simple sauce. It is a pretty straightforward dish, but its reputation propelled it to the loftiest of heights. Notably, actress Emily Blunt claimed in an interview on the podcast, Ruthie's Table 4, that she got her now-husband John Krasinski to propose by making him Garten's version of engagement chicken.

Some social media commentators have noted that marry me chicken bears a striking resemblance to Tuscan chicken – they are both made of seared chicken breasts in a sundried tomato and cream sauce—and this is not a coincidence. Marry me chicken was originally conceived in 2016 by Lindsay Funston, a recipe developer for Delish, who was trying to adapt a previous recipe for Tuscan chicken into a one-skillet meal. Funston at first planned to call her dish, "Sicilian Chicken Skillet," until she taped a recipe tutorial for it, and the videographer, upon sampling it, declared that she'd marry Funston for the dish.

Marry me chicken has earned an extraordinary amount of publicity for such a simple dish. It is, after all, simply pan-seared chicken breasts with a sauce of garlic, sun-dried tomatoes, chicken broth, cream, and parmesan cheese, plus a few seasonings. The name is what caught people's eyes, and some food scientists even tried to speculate on whether the chemical makeup of this particular dish could snag you your soulmate. Both tomatoes and garlic have long had reputations as aphrodisiacs. But as some have pointed out, this dish isn't just about inspiring lust, it's about inspiring love. The truth is, anytime you put the time and effort into making a meal from scratch for someone, you're doing an act of love, even if you don't get a ring out of it.

Marry me chicken became such a viral success on TikTok and other social media platforms that it was only a matter of time before other food content creators started making their own "marry me" recipes. Most of the earliest ones were simply adaptations of the marry me chicken formula, albeit with a few ingredient swaps, like marry me salmon or marry me steak. Soon, you had every kind of plant-based substitute you could think of, including marry be beans, marry me mushrooms, and marry me chickpeas. There have also been innumerable videos turning marry me chicken into a one-pot pasta dish.

From there, things got weird, as content creators started slapping the "marry me" label on foods that were completely unrelated to the original marry me chicken, like pot roast and ramen. As it gained prevalence, the term became somewhat controversial, prompting debates about the stereotypical gender roles of women in the kitchen and men holding the sole power to propose, as well as whether marriage should really be seen as the ultimate achievement in life, and how much the institution really reflects true love. It may all sound a bit lofty for a simple chicken dish, but the mileage that marry me chicken has gotten from its moniker should put the old question of "what's in a name?" to bed for good.