Home › Seven Weeks' Menus › Liberty Chicken
Liberty Chicken
3/4 cup butter or margarine 3/4 cup flour 3 3/4 cups milk 1 1/2 cups diced cooked chicken 1 small can pimientoes 1/2 cup small button mushrooms, cooked 3 teaspoons salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper 1/4 cup chopped parsley dash paprika 1 1/2 tablespoons capers 1 beaten egg Make white sauce by melting the butter or margarine, smoothing flour with it and then gradually creaming in the milk. Let bubble several minutes. Add chicken, pimientoes and mushrooms, heating well. Add seasonings. Just before ready to serve, stir in beaten egg, and cook 1 minute to set egg. Serve with toast, or with a round of pie crust dough previously baked, laid on top of each serving.
A thick cream sauce carrying chicken, pimiento and mushrooms — chicken à la king in all but name, enriched with egg at the last moment. The egg is the only step that can go wrong.
- Temper the eggStirring a raw beaten egg straight into a bubbling sauce will scramble it in streaks. Whisk a ladle of the hot sauce into the egg first, return the mixture to the pan off the heat, then cook one minute over low heat without letting it boil again.
- Sauce ratioThree-quarters cup each of fat and flour to 3 3/4 cups milk is a heavy sauce, around half again to twice the thickening of a standard cream sauce. That looks deliberate — it has to hold up under toast or pastry — but it will stiffen considerably on cooling, so thin with a little more milk if you want it spoonable.
- Cook out the flour"Let bubble several minutes" means exactly that. A roux this size needs three to five minutes of gentle simmering after the milk goes in, stirred constantly, or the finished dish tastes of raw flour.
- SaltThree teaspoons is high by current taste, and the capers and canned pimiento bring their own salt. Start with one teaspoon and correct at the end.
- Pimientos"1 small can" in this period is likely somewhere around 2 to 4 ounces, drained and diced or cut in strips. Jarred piquillo or roasted red pepper works, though it is sweeter and less soft than the canned article.
- Mushrooms"Small button mushrooms, cooked" probably points to a drained can of buttons, though it may simply mean fresh ones cooked first. Fresh small mushrooms sautéed in butter until their liquid has gone are better and will not water down the sauce.
- The pastry roundA disc of pie dough baked separately and set on each portion does the work of a pastry shell more cheaply. The recipe gives no oven setting; a hot oven, around 425F for 10 to 12 minutes until dry and pale gold, will do, and hold them until service so they stay crisp.
- YieldProbably four to six servings over toast, depending on how generously it is ladled. It reheats poorly once the egg is in — warm gently and never boil.
"Liberty" attached to a dish name is often a wartime substitution: the First World War gave American menus liberty cabbage for sauerkraut and liberty steak for hamburger, and the habit resurfaced in the 1940s. What sits underneath this particular name is chicken à la king — diced cooked chicken in cream sauce with pimiento and mushrooms, served in a pastry case — a dish whose origin is claimed by several turn-of-the-century hotels and restaurants and settled by none of them. The "butter or margarine" in the first line and the reliance on canned pimiento and canned buttons suggest a rationing-conscious kitchen, and the egg stirred in at the end may be a frugal way to enrich a sauce that in fatter years would have taken cream and a glass of sherry.