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Chicken à La King
2 tablespoons fat
1 cup quartered mushrooms
2 tablespoons flour
I pimiento cut in narrow strips
1 cup milk
2 cups cooked diced chicken
1 cup cream
1 teaspoon salt
2 egg-yolks
½ teaspoon pepper
I green pepper, minced
Make a white sauce of the fat, flour, milk, cream, salt and pepper. Add the mushrooms, green pepper, pimiento and chicken. Cook until the meat is heated through. Just before serving stir in the egg-yolks, slightly beaten, and cook for a moment, stirring constantly. Serve at once on squares of hot toast.
VEGETARIAN DISHES
A straightforward creamed-chicken dish whose only real difficulty is the egg-yolk finish. The list is set in two columns in the original, which is why the ingredients appear interleaved.
- The hinge: the yolksBeat the yolks with a spoonful of the hot sauce first, then stir the mixture back in off the heat or over the barest flame. Held at a simmer they will scramble and the sauce will turn grainy; a minute of gentle stirring is enough to thicken it.
- Reading the ingredient listThe columns pair up as: 2 tablespoons fat, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, 1 cup cream, 2 egg-yolks, 1 green pepper minced; and 1 cup quartered mushrooms, 1 pimiento in strips, 2 cups cooked diced chicken, 1 teaspoon salt, ½ teaspoon pepper.
- "Fat"In an American cookbook of this period this means butter, or else chicken fat, lard or a shortening compound. Butter is the sensible choice here. The sauce is a loose one in any case: 2 tablespoons of flour to two cups of milk and cream.
- Raw mushroomsThe mushrooms go in uncooked and will shed water into the sauce. Sauté them in a little of the butter first and add them with their liquid reduced, or the finished dish will be thin.
- Green pepperMinced raw green pepper stays sharp and crunchy in the few minutes given. A brief sweat with the mushrooms softens it without losing the colour.
- PimientoBy this date usually sold in small jars or cans, roasted and skinned and packed in liquid, though fresh pimientos were also available in season. Drain and blot before slicing so the packing liquid does not thin the sauce.
- Half a teaspoon of pepperThat is a heavy hand by current taste for four servings. Start with a quarter teaspoon of white pepper and correct at the end.
- Yield and servingNo yield is given; roughly four servings on toast, generous for two. It also fills pastry shells or sits on rice or split biscuits; keep it hot in a bowl over warm water rather than over direct heat.
Chicken a la King is an early-twentieth-century American restaurant dish, and the several competing origin stories all place it in hotel and club dining rooms of the 1880s-1900s - Delmonico's in New York and the Brighton Beach Hotel are the names most often repeated, with the "King" variously a guest named Keene, Clark or King. None of these accounts is firmly documented, but the dish spread fast through cookbooks and lunch counters because it turns already-cooked fowl into something that reads as company food. The pimiento and green pepper are the period signature, canned pimientos having become cheap and widely available in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s, and the egg-yolk enrichment is the older technique of finishing a white sauce as a liaison rather than simply thickening it with flour.