In December 2003, Beth Ostrosky wanted to bring radio shock jock Howard Stern to his knees, so she whipped out the big guns — and took out the gizzards. She cooked her then-boyfriend of a few years a chicken dish from a recipe in Glamour magazine, and sat Stern down for a candlelit dinner.
“I swear to you, he had never been love-ier or more romantic. He was saying the sweetest things to me. And in the back of my mind, I was chuckling, ‘Wow, that magazine knows what it’s doing,’ ” says the 38-year-old with a laugh.
The next morning Stern raved about the meal on his radio show.
“He started talking about the lemons ‘up the chicken’s butt’ when a woman called in and said: ‘Howard, you just described Engagement Chicken. Beth wants you to marry her.’ ”
Stern immediately called his girlfriend, live on the air, and told her the jig was up. “I was busted,” admits Ostrosky, who had torn the title off the recipe page as a precaution, just in case Stern happened to see it lying around.
Still, her ruse worked. About three years later, on Feb. 14, 2007, her radio-personality beau (who famously vowed never to marry again) popped the question.
“I think [Stern proposed] because of the way it was going with us. And I can cook a mean chicken,” jokes Ostrosky.
The dish originated in the offices of the magazine in the ’90s, when Kim Bonnell — then a fashion editor — developed a recipe for a simple roast chicken that was inspired by a trip to Italy.
“There were a lot of women in the office, and there was this fairly common rite of passage when someone was dating. They’d say, ‘Oh, my God, I invited this guy over for dinner! What should I make?’ ” says Bonnell, who lives on the Upper West Side.
Bonnell, now the mother of a college-age son, always came to the rescue, passing along her simple, delicious chicken recipe, which calls for only lemons, herbs, salt and pepper. And voila: Three of the four co-workers who cooked the dish for their boyfriends ended up getting engaged soon after.
Glamour Editor-in-Chief Cindi Leive got wind of the magical marriage meal and ran the recipe, appropriately dubbed “Engagement Chicken,” in the magazine.
“This isn’t just urban legend. This is real,” says Leive, 44.
Ostrosky, who now goes by the last name Ostrosky Stern, agrees. “To this day, people stop me on the street three or four times a week and say Engagement Chicken worked for them,” she says.
Leive boasts that more than 70 women have gotten engaged after making the chicken. And that’s just the on-the-record success stories. “Tons of people will e-mail us and will say, ‘But you cannot use my real name because I cannot let my husband know,’ ” explains Leive, who lives in Cobble Hill.
“There is a certain type of woman who doesn’t want their husband to know that they were roped in by Frank Perdue.”
Then there’s Lindsey Unterberger, 27, who wasn’t going for subtlety when she set out to woo her college sweetheart with the miraculous dish.
Unterberger, an online style editor, and her now-husband, Aaron Perlstein, 27, met at the University of Missouri and started dating their sophom*ore year. Three years after graduation, in 2008, the couple was living together in the East Village.
“I’m like, ‘OK, when is this ring happening already? I’m ready!’ ” says Unterberger.
She was flipping through back issues of Glamour when she came across the recipe and decided to write a blog, “Engagement Chick,” about getting her beau to put a ring on it — via the chicken.
“I didn’t know about the blog. I was out of town on a business trip and came back and walked in the door, dropped my suitcase, and Lindsey’s standing there in the kitchen, holding a roasting pan with an apron underneath a shirt that says ‘I Love AP,’ ” recalls Perlstein, who works as a senior media buyer for Wieden + Kennedy, an ad agency. The day after Perlstein gobbled up the bird, Unterberger came clean about her blog and the recipe’s intent.
“I remember being really sheepish, and said, ‘Remember when I made you that chicken? Well, I started writing a blog . . .,’ ” the editor recalls.
Perlstein was a good sport. “I said, ‘To be honest, [the blog] isn’t my favorite thing you’ve done, but I’m surprised it took you this long to do it,’ ” he says.
He proposed three months later, on Oct. 2, 2009. Unterberger never cooked the dish again.
But plenty of others have. The recipe’s been reprinted in the magazine or online six times (the most of any of the magazine’s recipes), and is the headliner for its new cookbook, “100 Recipes Every Woman Should Know: Engagement Chicken and 99 Other Fabulous Dishes To Get You Everything You Want in Life,” out April 5.
So why does the humble chicken dish possess so much romantic power?
“Remember the old Pillsbury slogan that ‘Nothing says lovin’ like something from the oven?’ ” asks Leive. “It sounds so horribly retro, but it’s true. Roast chicken is one of those dishes that says, ‘I took some time. I made something that says I’m taking care of you.’ It’s delicious, but also comfortable.”
Seconding that view is Karl Myers, 39, who was putty in his now-wife Doris’ hands after she roasted the chicken for him in April 2007. Myers was hypnotized by the “very juicy” and “very moist” poultry.
“Soon after eating the chicken, it wasn’t a conscious thing, but I just found myself getting an engagement ring made,” admits Myers, who lives in The Bronx and owns Main Drag Music in Williamsburg. “I was like, ‘Wow, how did I get here?’ It wasn’t a conscious thing,” he says.
“I don’t know if it’s the lemon that does it . . .”
Ingredients
1 whole chicken (approximately 4 pounds)
½ cup fresh lemon juice, plus 3 whole lemons — including 1 sliced for garnish
1 tablespoon kosher or coarse sea salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
Fresh herbs for garnish (4 rosemary sprigs, 4 sage sprigs, 8 thyme sprigs and 1 bunch flat-leaf parsley)
- Position an oven rack in the upper third of the oven and preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Remove the giblets from the chicken, wash the chicken inside and out with cold water, then let the chicken drain, cavity down, in a colander for two minutes.
- Pat the chicken dry with paper towels. Place the chicken breast-side down in a medium roasting pan fitted with a rack and pour the lemon juice all over the chicken, both inside and out. Season the chicken all over with salt and pepper, inside and out.
- Prick two whole lemons three times each in three different places with a fork and place them deep inside the cavity. Chicken cavity size may vary, so if one lemon is partly sticking out, that’s fine.
- Put the chicken in the oven, lower the oven temperature to 350 degrees, and roast, uncovered, for 15 minutes.
- Remove the roasting pan from the oven. Using tongs or two wooden spoons, turn the chicken breast-side up. Insert a meat thermometer in the thigh, return the chicken to the oven and roast for about one hour to one hour and 15 minutes, or until the meat thermometer reads 180 degrees and the juices run clear when the thigh is pricked with a fork. Continue roasting if necessary. Keep in mind that cooking times in different ovens vary; roasting a chicken at 350 degrees takes approximately 18 to 20 minutes per pound, plus an additional 15 minutes.
- Let the chicken rest for 10 minutes before carving. And here’s the secret: Pour the juices from the roasting pan on top of the sliced chicken — this is the “marry me juice.” Garnish with fresh herbs and lemon slices.
- Any simple sides will work with a main course this splendid. You can go with either white wine (Riesling is nice) or red (try Pinot Noir). Happy cooking — and an even happier future to you and the lucky person you’ve deemed worthy of this dish!
100 Recipes Every Woman Should Know: Engagement Chicken and 99 Other Fabulous Dishes to Get You Everything You Want in Life by Cindi Leive and the Editors of Glamour. Copyright (c) 2011. Published by Hyperion. All Rights Reserved.
