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Chicken a la King
Use left-over chicken from Sunday. Combine with white sauce and season with salt, pepper, paprika, pimientoes chopped fine and canned peas.
This is a menu-book shorthand rather than a full recipe — it assumes you already know how to make a white sauce and are working through Sunday's roast chicken. The quantities below are the ones the original leaves you to supply.
- Working proportionsFor about 2 cups of diced cooked chicken, make 2 cups of medium white sauce (4 tbsp butter, 4 tbsp flour, 2 cups milk). That serves four generously over toast, in patty shells, or on rice.
- White sauce, 1930s styleA "medium" white sauce of the period is 2 tablespoons each butter and flour per cup of liquid. Cook the flour in the butter a full two minutes before adding milk or the sauce tastes pasty.
- PimientoesCanned pimientos — sweet red peppers, peeled and packed in brine. Jarred roasted red peppers are the closest current equivalent; drain and blot them or they will thin the sauce and tint it pink.
- Canned peasCanned peas of the era were fully cooked and quite soft. Add them at the very end and only heat through. Frozen peas work and hold their shape better; a scant cup is right for this quantity.
- The chicken is already cookedEverything in the pan needs only to be brought to serving heat. Simmering diced cooked breast meat in sauce for any length of time makes it stringy and dry — two or three minutes over low heat is enough.
- What the original omitsClassic Chicken à la King also carries sautéed mushrooms and a finish of egg yolk beaten with cream or a spoonful of sherry, stirred in off the heat. The original here calls for neither.
- SeasoningPaprika does real work here, both colour and a faint sweetness. Use a fresh sweet Hungarian paprika; the stale tin at the back of the cupboard contributes nothing but dust.
Chicken à la King belongs to the hotel-and-chafing-dish cookery of the turn of the twentieth century, and its origin is disputed in the usual way — variously credited to the Brighton Beach Hotel, Delmonico's, and London's Claridge's, with a "Mr. King" or "Mr. Keene" in each telling. By the 1920s and 1930s it was also well established as a home cook's device for stretching leftovers, which is the role it plays here: a Sunday roast reappearing on a weekday under a French-sounding name. Menu planning of this period was often organised around the joint, and the value of a dish like this lay less in novelty than in its ability to absorb whatever the carving had left behind, dressed up with the pantry glamour of canned pimientos and peas.