The chicken parm doesn’t exist in Italy. Here’s what does.
And neither does fettuccine Alfredo, garlic bread, or 90% of what your local trattoria called "authentic" in 1998.
The first time I ordered chicken parmigiana in Naples, the waiter looked at me like I had asked for a glass of milk with my dinner. “Parmigiana di pollo? Maybe go to America for that one.”
Here is the situation. Parmigiana — the actual dish, the one your great-aunt in Salerno would recognise — is a layered casserole of fried eggplant, tomato sauce, basil, salted mozzarella, and grated parmigiano reggiano. It is baked, it is rested, it is served at room temperature. There is no chicken. There has never been chicken.
Italian-Americans invented chicken parm because they could finally afford chicken. That is, more or less, the whole origin myth. In Sorrento in 1910 you did not have a chicken to spare. In Bensonhurst in 1955 you had a job at the docks and a freezer. And so the cotoletta met the parmigiana and the dish that your local red-sauce joint serves today was born somewhere in the middle.
What’s actually on the table in Parma
In Parma — the actual city where parmigiano reggiano comes from — they eat tortelli di zucca, anolini in brodo, and bollito misto with mostarda. There is no parmigiana di pollo on any menu we visited.
“Americans think Italian food is one big thing. It’s twenty different countries that got glued together in 1861, and we still don’t fully agree on the glue.”— ALESSANDRO BOCCHINI, RESTAURATEUR, PARMA
So what should you cook instead?
If what you actually love about chicken parm is the crunchy, cheesy, tomatoey comfort of it — and there is nothing wrong with that — there is a southern Italian grandmother somewhere who has already solved this for you. It is called melanzane alla parmigiana.
If you actually want a breaded fried thing in your life, that is the cotoletta alla milanese. It is veal, not chicken, pounded thin, breaded, and fried in a lot of butter. Served with nothing on top. It does not need the sauce. The sauce would ruin it.
Combine the two and you have invented a perfectly fine American dish that deserves to be called something else. We propose: chicken parm. Just stop telling people it’s Italian.
