QUESTION: What the hell is "Tuscan chicken"?
Rachael Ray: chicken in gravy
All Recipes: chicken with spaghetti sauce, olives and cannellini beans, sort of like a puttanesca, I guess
Low Carb: essentially chicken paillard or scallopini
Bon Appetit: chicken with garlic, lemon, rosemary, olive oil
Another place: chicken with olive oil, rosemary, wine, garlic
Lean Cuisine ("Chicken Tuscan"): "Chicken tenderloins and linguine in a sun-dried tomato sauce served with broccoli and carrots."
McCormick's, the spices not the low end liquor: chicken, "Italian seasoning", Garlic Pepper, mustard
Perdue: chicken with a puttanesca sauce
Arizona Republic: chicken with "pesto mix"
ANSWER: Nobody knows what this is. From our investigation, "Tuscan" appears to be a mostly meaningless, completely imprecise adjective - it is replacing "Italian", which is another imprecise adjective that has come to mean "garlic + oregano".
Tuscan seems to have been chosen because Tuscany has romance attached to it, likely due to books/movies like "Under the Tuscan Sun", but the cuisine of Tuscany speaks to a difficult life. The bread that is associated with the region - pane toscano - is unsalted, which makes it last longer, but also taste completely insipid. As bread goes, it's really awful. You don't want to butter it and eat it plain, like a baguette. You have to use it in panzanellas or "bread soup" or something - it is used to make limited amounts of good tasting food go farther.
I kind of think this weird, confused naming convention comes from our collective, limited, sloppy understanding of "Italian", which is really a bunch of different traditions lumped into one. "Italy" wasn't unified until the 1860s under the House of Savoy. What if it were never unified and the regions remained separate politically, would we have things like "Tuscan chicken"? Probably not. This is a weak, squishy thesis, but I think that sub-national adjectives for dishes exist because we can't effectively map our storybook marketing ideas about a well-defined place that we are too aware of and has an identity of its own.
I suppose you could take this further and imagine political power coming from this kind of behavior by outsiders. I'm mostly interested in the culinary side of this, so for the moment just take a place that isn't particularly well recognized, assign some vague, upbeat meaning to it and give it a dish: can the people who live there use the recognition that comes from it as influence? If it was the ill-fated mid-90s "Sedona Grill Wood-Fired Pizza", then the answer is "no" - the residents of Sedona were never able to organize an uprising around a niche brand of frozen pizza. But things like Seattle becoming (rightly or wrongly) identified with coffee can sort of give shape to it and reinforces a stereotype that becomes political at times (the "latte tax" issue of 2003). And in the House there's the "Shellfish Caucus", which would be based on actual economic activity. And if you saw "Thank You For Smoking", there's something I should say about William H. Macy's character.
