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Chicken a La King
1 boiled chicken, cut in thick pieces 1 can mushrooms 2 green peppers, 1 red pepper cut fine Salt to taste 1 can green peas White dressing-2 T butter, 2 T flour, 2 C milk.
Melt butter in pan, cook flour in hot butter, then add the milk. Cook until thickened. Add to ingredients and beat thoroughly. Serve on toast or in patty shells.
Mrs. Gertrude Wolf.
A community-cookbook shorthand version of a hotel dish: the whole thing hangs on a béchamel, and the recipe assumes you can judge quantities yourself.
- The hinge: cook the flourLet the flour bubble in the butter a full two minutes before the milk goes in, or the sauce tastes pasty. Add the milk gradually and whisk; 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour to 2 cups milk is on the thin side by the usual reckoning, a light sauce that will barely coat the chicken.
- "Beat thoroughly" means foldTaken literally you will shred the chicken. Combine the sauce with the chicken and vegetables over low heat and stir gently until everything is hot through.
- T and CT is tablespoon, C is cup, standard in American church cookbooks by this date. The recipe gives no measure at all for the chicken, so work from a 3½–4 lb bird, which yields roughly 4 cups of meat in thick pieces.
- Canned mushrooms and peasCan sizes varied: period canned peas commonly came in a No. 2 can of about 20 oz, mushrooms in smaller tins of roughly 4 to 8 oz. Drain both well or the sauce thins. Sauteed fresh mushrooms are a straight improvement; frozen peas added at the end keep their color.
- The peppersTwo green and one red raw pepper, finely diced, will stay crunchy and taste grassy if simply stirred in. Softening them in a little butter first is the usual practice in fuller versions of the dish.
- Boiled chickenPoach the bird gently rather than at a rolling boil, and save the broth — a half cup of it in place of some of the milk gives the sauce far more flavor than milk alone.
- Patty shellsThese were baked puff-pastry cases, sold by bakers and later frozen as vol-au-vent shells. Frozen puff pastry cut into rounds does the same job; toast points are the plainer option the recipe already allows.
- YieldServes six as a luncheon dish, four if it is the whole meal. It thickens as it stands; loosen with milk or broth when reheating, over low heat.
Chicken à la king appears in American cookbooks from around the turn of the twentieth century, and its origin is disputed rather than documented — claims attach variously to Delmonico's in New York, the Brighton Beach Hotel, and a London hotel chef, all of them traditional attributions rather than proven ones. What is clear is that by the 1910s and 1920s it had escaped the restaurant entirely and become the standard American ladies'-luncheon dish: creamed meat in a white sauce, brightened with pimiento and peas, served over toast or in a bought pastry shell so that no one had to carve anything at the table. Its arrival in a Presbyterian church cookbook from Libertyville, Illinois, is a small marker of that journey, and the reliance on two cans shows how thoroughly commercially canned vegetables had entered the ordinary Midwestern kitchen — a hotel dish reduced to a leftover-chicken formula a contributor could write out in six lines.