Whimsical Chicken is a newcomer to Italian-American cuisine. This dish began to appear on the menus of neighborhood restaurants during the 1980′s, when a wider array of “exotic” and “gourmet” salad greens, like arugula, began to appear in mainstream markets. Patricia Brooks, writing in The New York Times in 1987, mentions—without further comment on the dish—Maresca’s Ristorante in New Haven, Connecticut serving Chicken Capricciosa.

This recipe seems to have popped up at a time when Americans were thinking about “lighter” Italian-American dishes, the same period in which line-cooks were plating dizzying amounts of Chicken Ziti and Broccoli, and Chicken Caesar Salad.

The dish shares the same lineage as Chicken alla Milanese, but the garnish adds flavor, color, texture that take it beyond a simple breaded, sautéed chicken breast.

We’ve also come across an accompaniment of other upscale salad leaves, notably garnet-colored radicchio. However, the pleasantly bitter bite of arugula is clearly the favorite and appears on most menus, making anything, including veal, capricciosa.

Ingredients:

For the Garnish:

2 Cups arugula
1 Cup ripe tomatoes, diced
½ Red onion, diced
3 Tbs. Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt & freshly ground black pepper

For the Chicken:

4 Skinless, boneless chicken breasts
½ Cup Parmesan 1 Cup unseasoned breadcrumbs
Grated rind from 1 lemon
2 Eggs, lightly beaten
Salt & freshly ground black pepper
2 Tbs. Olive oil
3 Tbs. Unsalted butter
4 Tbs. Flat-leaf Italian parsley, finely chopped
Juice of 1 lemon

Preparation:

For the Garnish:

Combine the arugula, tomatoes, and onion in a bowl. Add the olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and toss to combine.

For the Chicken:

Pour the Parmesan, breadcrumbs, and lemon rind into a shallow-sided dish and season with salt and pepper. Pour the eggs into another shallow-sided dish and season them with salt and pepper as well.

Dip the chicken breasts into the egg mixture, then into the breadcrumb mixture. Shake off any excess and reserve on a plate.

Heat a large sauté pan over medium-high heat, then add the olive oil. Add the chicken breasts and sauté until cooked through and golden brown (2 – 3 minutes per side). Add the butter to the sauté pan, and stir with a wooden spoon to loosen any caramelized bits of chicken that may have stuck to the bottom of the pan. Remove from the heat, and stir in the chopped parsley.

To Serve:

Arrange the chicken breasts on a platter, spoon the pan sauce over all, then drizzle with the lemon juice. Garnish each serving with the arugula, tomato, red onion mixture.

Serves four

The lentils are said to symbolize coins which the diner can hope to amass in the coming year. And for poor Italian peasants and laborers, the sausage once represented opulence.

Most southern Italians eat cotechino sausage on New Year’s Day. Lavishly spiced with coriander seed, black pepper, nutmeg, mace, cloves, allspice, and cinnamon, this is a fresh pork sausage that includes those proverbial everything-but-the-squeal portions of a pig. Cotechino may very well have been the inspiration for Winston Churchill’s remark that anyone interested in laws and sausages should never watch them being made.

Italians north of Rome eat a sausage similar to cotechino, but butchers stuff the meat into a pig’s foot and call it Zampone.

Unable to buy a cotechino locally, in time for our New Year’s dinner, we hardly felt deprived. The sausages we did serve may have come from a Tampa Bay area supermarket chain, Sweet Bay, but we consider them the equal of the very best sausages we’ve ever had—in Italy and from artisan butchers in New England. In fact, we’ve written before about our fantasy of a kindly old Italian fellow dressed in a threadbare grey cardigan sweater going to Sweet Bay’s corporate kitchens once or twice a week to supervise the making of the sausage.

Our lentils, cooked separately with bay leaves, garlic, and orange peel, finished in the pan with the sausages, were delicious. But with or without sausages, lentils carry the main message. So we hope all our readers have a happy, healthy year. May you and your loved ones share the abbondanza we wish for you in 2008.