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Chicken à La King
1 cup chicken, cubed 2 mushrooms 1/4 green pepper 1 tablespoon butter 2 tablespoons flour 1/2 cup chicken broth 1/2 cup cream Salt and paprika to taste 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice 1 egg yolk Cook mushrooms and pepper in 1/2 tablespoonful butter; melt rest of butter; remove from heat; add flour and stir until smooth; add stock and cream and return to fire; when boiling add other ingredients with egg yolk last. Serve on toast and garnish with parsley.
A small, quick recipe that assumes you already have cooked chicken and a little broth on hand. The only real difficulty is the egg yolk, which the original drops into a boiling sauce.
- Temper the yolkAdding a raw yolk straight to a boiling sauce will scramble it. Pull the pan off the heat, whisk a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce into the beaten yolk, then stir that back in and let it thicken over low heat without returning to a boil.
- "2 mushrooms"An unhelpfully vague measure; two mushrooms might be anything from an ounce to three. Reckon on about 2 oz, or roughly half a cup sliced. Slice and cook them until the water they release has evaporated, or the sauce will thin.
- The rouxOne tablespoon of butter minus the half spent on the vegetables leaves very little fat for two tablespoons of flour. Use a full tablespoon of butter for the roux and cook the vegetables in a separate half tablespoon, or the paste will be dry and grainy.
- Green pepperA quarter of a green bell pepper, finely diced. Canned pimiento, the usual partner in later versions of this dish, is not in this recipe but is a fair addition if you want the color.
- ChickenPoached or roast breast and thigh, cut in half-inch cubes; the recipe does not specify, and leftover cooked bird would suit it. Home-made broth from the same bird will tell in a sauce this small.
- YieldAbout two cups of finished mixture, which serves two on toast points as a light lunch, or four as a first course.
- ServingThe toast must be crisp and dry or it collapses under the sauce. Cut into triangles, sauce just before it goes to the table.
Chicken à la King belongs to the American hotel and chafing-dish cookery of the turn of the twentieth century, and its origin is contested: claims attach variously to Delmonico's in New York, the Brighton Beach Hotel, and Claridge's in London, with the "King" generally traced to a proprietor or patron surnamed King rather than to any monarch. What is certain is that by the 1910s and 1920s it had become a standard way to use leftover cooked fowl — a cream sauce enriched with egg yolk, brightened with lemon and paprika, spooned over toast. The dish's later reputation as banquet and cafeteria food came from exactly the qualities that made it useful at home: it stretches a cup of meat, it holds in a chafing dish, and it costs very little.