Can you “Marry Me” anything?
A number of “Marry Me” recipes, a protein draped in a creamy sun-dried tomato sauce (“Marry Me Chicken”; my colleague Alexa Weibel’s tomato beans, which readers are calling “Marry Me Beans”), made my editors and me wonder: Just because you can drench something in that dreamy ’90s pink sauce, should you?
You should.
How else would you find out that crisp-skinned salmon is spectacular with “Marry Me” sauce?
Lindsay Funston’s Tuscan-style chicken recipe raked in millions of views after it was published on Delish.com in 2016 and found new life on TikTok years later. “Marry Me Salmon” is a fantastic riff, a fish dinner you can cook for yourself and the love of your life any day of the week. It’s also nothing new.
In 2023, Alyssa Rivers of the Recipe Critic blog published a version with lemon zest, which helpfully brightens fatty fishes, as did Hajar Larbah, who runs the blog Moribyan. As Ms. Larbah describes the salmon, it’s “so good it will make you say ‘Marry Me’ to whomever makes it for you!” Hers omits the sun-dried tomatoes but maintains the dish’s lush, creamy essence. There are others, too, that vary in ingredients, but all bear the title of “Marry Me.”
For weeks, I was on the hunt for one of those old-fashioned red-sauce-joint emulsions, light on the palate, almost brothy but rich. While eating as many pink sauces as I could out in the world, I realized that what makes the best ones stand out is simplicity, with nothing competing — and lots of yellow onion, sweet, mild and familiar. You could add garlic, but salmon isn’t chicken, so its sauce needs a lighter touch.
Chicken broth works, but bottled clam juice (a smart tip from my colleague Genevieve Ko), readily available in most grocery stores, gives you a clean seafood taste. A splash of heavy cream takes you into blushed vodka-sauce territory. Sun-dried tomatoes make it “Marry Me.”
By pan-searing the fish, mostly on the skin side, in sun-dried tomato oil, then gently (and briefly) poaching the flesh side in the “Marry Me” sauce, you get shattering skin yielding to plush salmon. There’s something beautiful in how even the most simple treatment can bring out an ingredient’s best qualities.
No one told me that when I got down on a knee last August and asked my partner to marry me, that nothing would change; there would still be dishes to do, bills to pay and laundry to sort. But having fit this dish into our busy lives time and again, I realized that marriage is the everyday parts, the parade of weeknight dinners over the occasional date night. “Marry Me” truly can mean anything, but above all, it’s when the ordinary becomes transcendent.
