My father's family have been in Maryland since the 1600s. When my father made fried chicken, he made it with lard, a seasoned breading, and a milk gravy, somewhat like country fried steak. But he never billed it as "Maryland fried chicken" or conveyed any sense of "this is how ~we Marylanders~ do it" whereas with other things, like crab cakes, there was definitely a sense of This Is How We Do It Here And Those People In Virginia Can Go To Hell.
I live in Maryland and have an interest in food history, and I'm not actually sure I've ever seen this dish in any cookbooks from Maryland. I have a feeling it got named because somebody felt Maryland was "exotic", but they'd never actually been here.<p>We certainly have shallow-fried chicken, but that's hardly unique to Maryland. It's a very common Southern dish, and not unknown to New England either. It's easier to accomplish than deep frying.
Southern fried chicken has a fascinating history.<p>It combines West African techniques that used flavoured batter and palm oil to force seasoning deep into (albeit soggy) meat with Scottish techniques that used animal fat to create a crispy shell designed for preservation (albeit with little seasoning) [1]. Add in one of the few places on the planet, at the time, where cast iron was cheap enough to find its way to even slaves, and you get the cultural tradition that is Southern fried chicken: flavourful, crispy and accessible.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fried_chicken#History" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fried_chicken#History</a>