Florentine chicken, an Italian-French culinary hybrid

Daily Maverick

25-06-2025

Chicken breast fillets are cooked with spinach (beloved of old Fiorenze) in a cream sauce, and finished with Parmesan, in this classic dish which belongs in the repertoire of every home kitchen.
Florence, or Fiorenze in older times, is the capital city of Tuscany, but Florentine Chicken is a classic French recipe dating to 1553, when Catherine de Medici married Henry II, King of France.
In classical cuisines, this is the sort of claim that gets debunked. Wikipedia tells us that 'she [De Medici] supposedly brought a staff of chefs, lots of kitchen equipment and a love of spinach to Paris, and popularised Florentine-style dishes. Food historians have debunked this story, and Italian influence on French cuisine long predates this marriage. Pierre Franey considered this theory apocryphal, but embraced the term Florentine in 1983.'
Pierre Franey was a French-born American chef and television personality. I'm not sure this makes him the obvious authority to quote on the subject, but Wikipedia tends to veer towards an American view of food.
The term Florentine refers not to chicken or even the cream sauce in this preparation but to a dish made with spinach. Sole Florentine as made by Auguste Escoffier, grandpère of the French kitchen ranking system, is a famed example.
The sauce element of a Florentine dish is Mornay, essentially a béchamel (white sauce) to which cheese is added. In my recipe here, it isn't quite a cheese/Mornay sauce but a creamy sauce sprinkled with finely grated Parmesan.
Spinach is an important part of the recipe, and this is baby spinach, not Swiss chard which we South Africans usually call spinach. It's milder and, because it's young, softer too. It melds with the creamy sauce.
The chicken is cooked twice. First, it is fried gently until it turns golden in places, giving the resulting dish some of its beauty. Second, a cream sauce is made to which the garlic and spinach are added, and finally the cooked chicken pieces are returned to the pan to be warmed through in the sauce.
Florentine chicken can be cooked from start to finish in about half an hour, making this a dish to eat on a weeknight or turn out for a dinner party main course.
Tony's Florentine chicken
(Serves 3-4)
Ingredients
For frying the chicken breasts:
6 to 8 chicken breast fillets
1 or 2 tsp garlic powder
½ cup flour
Salt and black pepper to taste
To finish the Chicken Florentine:
2 Tbsp olive oil
3 Tbsp butter
1 cup dry white wine
3 cloves of garlic, peeled, crushed and then finely chopped
½ cup chicken stock
1 tsp dried Italian herbs
1 cup cream
Additional salt and black pepper to taste, if needed
2 cups baby spinach, rinsed and dried
½ cup finely grated Parmesan cheese
Method
Rinse and pat the chicken breasts dry. Using a sharp knife, place each fillet on its edge on a board and slice through the middle to create two flat pieces of fillet.
In a tub, mix the flour, garlic powder, salt and pepper together, using a whisk, to ensure that the seasonings spread throughout the flour.
Dredge the chicken pieces in the seasoned flour on both sides.
In a large, heavy pan, melt the butter and add the olive oil on a moderately high heat.
Fry the chicken breasts in this until nicely browned on both sides, about 4 minutes per side.
Remove them to a plate.
Add the wine and the chopped garlic to the pan and, as it bubbles, scrape the bottom of the pan to take up any flavour that has caught. Add the chicken stock and herbs, bring it to a simmer, and pour in the cream while stirring.
Add the spinach and push it under the cream with a spatula. The spinach will wilt into the sauce, creating a balance between the sauce and leaves. Taste the sauce and adjust seasoning if needed.
Add the chicken back to the pan, bring it back to a simmer, and cook gently for 3 or 4 minutes.
Sprinkle grated Parmesan on top and serve. I cooked some linguine to go with it, and it was a pleasing match. I liked the way it brought something else Italian to the finished dish. DM