TikTok might just be the best thing to ever happen to the home cooking world… and also the worst. From promoting a dangerous tequila cocktail hack to ignoring the tuberculosis risk of drinking raw milk the platform has given people some seriously bad ideas but then there’s the marry me chicken trend and that alone makes up for it. 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 the year (according to GoogleTrends). The craze hasn’t died down since with TikTok recipe videos for marry me chicken regularly racking up hundreds of thousands if not millions of views.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
 Cooking With Dave | 2023-01-02 17:00:03 |  793,908 Views |
Easy Marry Me Chicken Recipe! World's Best | MUST TRY!
It’s hard to ignore a dish with such a catchy name. The idea of a meal so delicious that the person you’re serving it to will get down on one knee and pull out a ring has made marry me chicken a Valentine’s Day favorite. But it’s not the first dish to carry this kind of promise in its name. In the 2000s a dish with a strikingly similar name emerged: engagement chicken. But before you think marry me chicken is just a rip-off of its predecessor you should know that the two dishes bear little resemblance to each other. In fact marry me chicken was inspired by something entirely different.
The story of the engagement chicken begins in 1982 at the offices of Glamour Magazine. As the story goes one of the magazine’s editors gave her assistant a recipe for roast chicken. The assistant went home and cooked the dish for her boyfriend and a month later the man proposed to her. The assistant then passed the recipe on to other employees who made it for their friends and soon after they were all proposed to.
The recipe for engagement chicken wasn't published in Glamour until 2004. Ina Garten of "Barefoot Contessa" fame also published a recipe after hearing about the dish from a friend at Glamour. Both versions call for a whole roasted chicken stuffed with lemon and garlic and served with the roasting juices poured over the meat to make a simple gravy. It's a fairly simple dish but its reputation has taken it to the highest levels. In particular actress Emily Blunt claimed in an interview on the podcast Ruthie's Table 4 that she convinced her now-husband John Krasinski to propose by making him Garten's version of engagement chicken.
