The act of triple-dipping goes back to my early years. Three shallow bowls: one with flour, another with beaten egg, the third with breadcrumbs. It’s as familiar as the 1970s brown Formica kitchen counter and the avocado-green fridge doors, with their faux-wood handles that would inevitably be smudged with sticky flour paste as I reached for an extra egg or two.
I don’t recall the first time I made chicken schnitzel independently — without the watchful gaze of my mother or father — but I remember the sensation, the bowls and the sequence of dipping the chicken: first in the flour, shaking the excess, then in the eggs and finally in the breadcrumbs, trying to get as much to cling to the meat for full coverage and crunch. I can feel the sticky fingers, and despite the inconvenience at the time, it gives me comfort.
As in so many other Israeli households, chicken schnitzel was a firm regular in ours, an echo of my mother’s Central European heritage. Another was tomato sauce, made by my Italian father with fresh tomatoes, garlic, olive oil and basil from the garden. Simmering away, it would always let you know it was there, with its unmistakable sweet smell and halo of red droplets from the simmering sauce drying on the white enamel stovetop.
Recipe: Halloumi Chicken Parmesan With Za’atar
Two everyday staples, and yet in our home they never met. The sauce was for pasta, heaped liberally with grated Parmesan; the schnitzel was served with lemon and occasionally capers, with potatoes alongside.
Surprising, really, considering how ubiquitous and much loved a dish like chicken parmigiana is. This 20th-century creation is, for me, the most natural coming together of two components that are clearly meant for each other: crispy chicken breast, freshly fried, and a mildly sweet tomato sauce, with the right consistency and acidity level to both dress the chicken and cut through the richness of the crust (and the melted cheese).
Parmesan and chicken, though, were not born together. The earliest ancestor is the popular parmigiana di melanzane: layered slices of fried eggplant cooked in a dish with tomato sauce, mozzarella and Parmesan (or other types of cheese). As with many revered classics, the origin is highly debated, with many people claiming their parental rights.
The province of Parma is a contender, being a center for production of Parmesan cheese, which is a key component in the dish. In his book “Mediterranean Vegetables,” the food scholar Clifford Wright puts forward the theory that parmigiana is named after the cheese and that the cheese is named after the province, but that the dish could still have actually originated from the south of Italy. Since Parmesan was widely traded and available throughout Italy as early as the 14th century, the other contending regions — Campania, Calabria and Sicily — could have also easily been the birthplace of parmigiana.
I often find it futile, though, to try to locate a single point on a map as the origin of a dish, any dish. Food is not a pure science or an applied technology, with well-documented sequential discoveries and inventions coming together as a solid body of knowledge. Cooking happens every day and evolves organically within communities and families. It is much more likely, in my mind, that dishes appear in a few places at the same time; that there is a spirit within a food culture that yields foods of a certain type, which only later we come to see as one dish.
As with many revered classics, the origin is highly debated.
With parmigiana, I find the attempts at explaining the name more enlightening than the geographical origin. Wright catalogs some theories. He points to the food writer Pino Correnti, who suggests that parmigiana doesn’t actually come from “Parmesan” but from the word damigiana, a wicker sleeve into which the hot casserole dish would have been placed. I particularly love an explanation brought forward by, among others, the food writer Mary Taylor Simeti. The Sicilian word palmigiana — from which the name supposedly derived, Simeti says in her book “Sicilian Food” — means shutters, describing the way the eggplant pieces are laid in the baking dish, like slats in a wooden shutter.
Name aside, the next stage in the evolution of parmigiana came as a result of migration. Italians arriving in America in the early 20th century could afford to use meat in their cooking in a way that wasn’t possible for them before. Veal, chicken, meatballs and shrimp could all be made “alla parmigiana.” As the chef Lidia Bastianich told the New York Times writer Melissa Clark in 2015, this approach peaked in the 1950s and remained prevalent through the 1970s.
The addition of chicken and other meats, and the breadcrumb coating, were Italian American adaptations, which took the dish in a new direction: heftier, not as light as the original parmigiana. “But lightness is not the point of the parmigianas we love so much in this country,” Clark writes. “At their best, these are indulgent, crunchy and molten-cheese-covered endeavors, best scooped out of a casserole dish or heaped onto a crisp semolina hero roll as a sandwich.”
I couldn’t agree more. The heavy and rich quality of chicken parmigiana is the real source of its appeal. Fried chicken, tomato sauce, Parmesan — a trinity of joy and comfort. An inevitable meeting that just needed for me to dip my fingers in egg, flour and breadcrumbs a few more times, while my father was making his tomato sauce, for the creation of a new family staple.