What's in a name? - 'marry me'/Tuscan chicken

"I know the internet has turned this dish into marry me chicken but it’s still Tuscan chicken to me!" The Taylor Table/Instagram

And what's Tuscan chicken anyway? Not Tuscan whatever else it might be.

But back to the beginning, although in a way it's really the end.

Pondering on this and that for today's post I decided to see what was trending in the food world and found on the Taste website - a list of Trends 2026, some of which were truly awful, but top of their list of the good was 'Marry me' anything - with their headline representative recipe (shown above) - Marry me chicken pie - Elisa Pietrantonio/Taste. The 'marry me' bit, I soon discovered, referred to ingredients rather than a particular method - chicken breast, sun-dried tomatoes, cream and Parmesan, seemed to be the fundamentals with various other small extras according to who was making it. Taste, however, quite correctly, referred to the 2026 trend as Marry me' anything - the anything being anything in terms of the main ingredient - it could be fish, seafood, chick peas, other bits of chicken - truly anything. The flavourings remained consistent, no matter how they were used. There was everything from pasta, through roasts to stir fries.

So I set off to discover 'marry me' in terms of food, and I quickly came upon The original marry me chicken - Lindsay Funton/Delish together with the origin story.

"I had produced one of Delish's first truly viral recipes, Tuscan Chicken Pasta (my baby, if we’re being honest), and was hungry for a skillet version that had similar ingredients but was even saucier." Lindsay Funton/Delish

'even saucier' included seasonings of dried thyme and chilli flakes.

And everyone seems to agree on this.

How did it get that name? Well Lindsay Funton tells us that it was originally going to be called Sicilian chicken skillet - which might have been more appropriate because of the sun-dried tomatoes which are a Southern Italian thing not a Tuscan one. However:

"After we spooned the sauce over the chicken for the last shot, our videographer, Chelsea, grabbed a fork to try the final result. Once she took a bite, she blurted out, "I'd marry you for that chicken!" and the now-famous name was born."

Please note here that all of that happened in 2016. Ten years ago. It became popular, so popular that in 2023 the New York Times had a go at it with this Marry me chicken from Naz Deravian who made it even more tomatoey by adding some tomato paste. Now it was out there in the media world and so TikTok et al. took it up - below a TikTok example of Marry me chicken from gimmme.delicious. So now we are viral but it's still a chicken dish - and chicken breasts at that.

I do not know when it came here - probably at about the same time. Taste has several recipes - undated, and delicious. has one that dates to last year.

So much for 'marry me' chicken - an obvious American invention but based on Lindsay Funton's own Tuscan chicken pasta - from Delish which was itself based on her colleague at Delish Lena Abraham's Creamy Tuscan chicken which I assumed had been based on a traditional Tuscan dish.

So I went looking online for what at least seemed like an authentic Tuscan chicken recipe, but although there were lots of recipes for such a thing, there were none from what looked like an 'authentically' Italian source - or at least a website focussed on Italian food. Nothing from The Guardian's Rachel Roddy, for example. I mean it is such a common dish, you would think that the Italians had examples. Which made me suspicious and as it was then lunchtime I decided to check out my extensive Italian cookbook collection, which includes Lorenza de' Medici's Tuscany (and Italy) the Beautiful; Elizabeth David's Italian Food; Claudia Roden's The Food of Italy, Bay Books The Food of Italy, Guy Grossi's Italian Food Safari and Claudia Roden's Med. All of them are really focussed on the authentic and not one of them had a recipe for Tuscan chicken - or anything sounding remotely like what we see above. Indeed Chicken cacciatore seemed to be the only slightly similar dish that was sometimes mentioned.

Only my Australian Women's Weekly Italian Cookbook of 1994 had a recipe and that had a more cautious title of Tuscany-style country chicken and it's not at all the same thing because it includes porcini, mushrooms, tomatoes and chicken stock. No cream, no spinach and no cheese. It's a casserole - more similar to chicken cacciatore than anything else.

I mean we've all heard of Tuscan chicken haven't we, even though we know that people often put Tuscan in the names of their recipes just so that we will get all excited about it?

So I went back to the net and in the introduction to Dan Pelosi's recipe for Creamy Tuscan chicken, on the New York Times website he said this:

"Despite its name, Tuscan chicken is not a traditional Italian recipe, but a dish of Italian-American origin, with its roots perhaps most frequently linked to Olive Garden. While it bears similarities to Chicken Florentine, with its creamy spinach sauce, as well as Marry Me Chicken, with its creamy tomato sauce, it is best described as a combination of the two."

Sort of Marry me chicken with spinach, but mostly no sun-dried tomatoes.

He mentioned Olive Garden - a small Italian eatery - so I tried to track down their recipe. The nearest I could find was on the Food.com website where Impera Magna presented Olive Garden Tuscan garlic chicken saying that the recipe was tracked down on the internet. And note that this is a pasta dish. All of the other copycat Olive Garden recipes I saw - and there are a few - were also pasta dishes

So at some point somebody decided to detach the pasta from the chicken in its sauce, but I don't know who that was.

Fascinating stuff really. In the sense of the creativity of the Italian/Americans, the importance of getting a name right for a recipe and the pull of certain key words like Tuscan and creamy. I'm not sure whether I have ever cooked this, but it's the sort of sauce that I could possibly have dreamed up all on my own - and you probably have too.

My final 'find' if you can call it that was an article in Eater entitled Why it's time to divorce ourselves from 'Marry me' recipes, which was a bit of a diatribe against marriage being seen as the ultimate aim for young women - no longer relevant in today's world. Which just goes to show how food reaches into all corners of human life.

So I'll conclude with our own - sort of - Adam Liaw who is definitely not Italian who has made a Baked Tuscan chicken and tells us that:

"While the origins of Tuscan chicken are largely unknown, it’s well-established as a dish that is more likely inspired by Italian flavours, rather than a traditional Tuscan recipe. Despite this, Tuscan chicken generally features chicken cooked in a creamy sauce with garlic, Italian herbs, sun-dried tomatoes and spinach to make for a hearty and comforting meal."

I can't tell you how many of the recipe writers whose recipes I at least looked at, mentioned the words comfort, comforting, cosy, family. It's that kind of dish. Looks tempting doesn't it?

YEARS GONE BY

July 26

2025 - Pinot gris or grigio?

2024 - Nothing

2023 - French in Fitzroy

2022 - Scrambled eggs - I think I've been here before

2021 - Missing

2020 - Missing

2019 - Tea-parties - there's more than one kind

2018 - The perils of the buffet

2017 - Supermarkets and bags

2016 - David's bread