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Chicken a la Max
Chop up some cold chicken into small squares, mix with a thick white sauce, and let it heat. Put it on a hot dish and cover with fried onions. Put chipped potatoes at the ends of the dish and a boiled chicory at either side. This excellent dish has received distinction also from its name, that of the heroic and ingenious burgomaster of Brussels.
A leftovers dish built for presentation: creamed chicken banked with onions, fried potatoes and braised endive. Everything hinges on the sauce being thick enough to hold the meat together rather than pool on the plate.
- ProportionsThe recipe gives none. For about 2 cups of diced cooked chicken (the meat of roughly half a roast bird), make the white sauce with 3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk. That is a coating consistency, thicker than a pouring bechamel, and it is what the word "thick" is doing here.
- Chicory means Belgian endiveWitloof, the pale forced chicon, not the frizzy green salad chicory. Boiled in plain water it turns bitter and waterlogged; braise it in a little butter, water and a pinch of sugar for 20-25 minutes and drain it well before it goes on the dish.
- Chipped potatoesMost likely fried potatoes cut in batons, what the reader would now call frites. Fry twice, once at around 325F to cook through and once at around 375F to colour.
- Fried onionsTwo medium onions, sliced thin and cooked slowly in butter until deep brown and sweet, 20 minutes or more. Rushed onions are simply raw and acrid under the cream sauce.
- Reheating the chickenFold the meat into the finished hot sauce and bring the whole to a bare simmer, no longer. Cooked chicken held at length in hot sauce goes stringy, and the flour will thin as it holds.
- Season it yourselfThe recipe assumes a seasoned sauce and says nothing. Salt, white pepper and a grating of nutmeg belong in the béchamel; a spoonful of the chicken's jellied roasting juices improves it considerably.
- Yield and assemblyServes three to four. The components are all served hot on one platter, so have the endive drained and the potatoes coming out of the fat as the sauce finishes.
The name honours Adolphe Max, burgomaster of Brussels, who refused to co-operate with the German occupation in 1914 and was imprisoned in Germany until he escaped in November 1918, shortly before the Armistice — an act that made him a national figure and a byword for civic defiance. The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in England in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees, and its proceeds went to relief work, so a dish named for Max was both a compliment and a small piece of wartime patriotism. The cooking itself is domestic thrift: cold roast chicken rescued with a white sauce, dressed up with the two things a Belgian kitchen of the period always had to hand, fried potatoes and forced witloof chicory, the latter a Brussels-area speciality generally traced to the mid-nineteenth century and grown in the dark to keep it pale.