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Chicken a La King
2 tablespoons flour 2 cups milk or 1 cup milk and 1 cup chicken stock 2 cups cooked chicken cut in pieces 1 pimento teaspoon pepper Melt the butter, add the mushrooms, cover and cook about 5 minutes, dredge with flour, add seasonings and liquid, chicken and pimento. Allow to cook a few minutes until sauce thickens, serve on toast or in patty shells.
The ingredient list as printed has lost several lines — butter, mushrooms and salt all appear in the method but never got their quantities set in type. The proportions below are the standard ones for a sauce of this size.
- The missing amountsFor 2 cups of liquid, use 2 tablespoons butter and about 1 cup sliced mushrooms, with roughly 1/2 teaspoon salt. The "teaspoon pepper" in the list has almost certainly lost a fraction: a full teaspoon of pepper in two cups of sauce would dominate everything, so read it as a quarter- or eighth-teaspoon.
- The flour is light on purposeTwo tablespoons of flour to two cups of liquid gives a thin, pourable sauce rather than a stiff one. If you want it to sit on toast without flooding the plate, go to 3 tablespoons.
- Dredge with flourThis means scattering the flour over the buttered mushrooms in the pan and stirring it in, not coating anything separately. Let it cook a minute before the liquid goes in or the sauce will taste of raw flour.
- PimentoA single canned pimento — the sweet red pepper sold skinned and packed in brine, roughly one small pepper's worth. Drain it and cut it into thin strips or small dice. Jarred roasted red pepper is the closest current equivalent.
- Keep it below a boilThe chicken is already cooked. Once it goes in, hold the pan at a bare simmer just long enough to heat through; a hard boil shreds the meat and can break the sauce.
- Patty shellsBaked puff-pastry cases, sold frozen as vol-au-vent shells. Bake them empty and fill at the last moment, otherwise the pastry softens.
- What a richer version addsFuller versions of the dish finish the sauce off the heat with an egg yolk beaten into a little cream, and a spoonful of sherry. Neither appears in this version, which is the plainer treatment.
- YieldAbout four servings on toast, or six as a filling for small patty shells.
Chicken à la King is an American hotel dish of the 1890s whose paternity has never been settled: it is variously credited to Delmonico's in New York (made for the sportsman Foxhall Keene), to the Brighton Beach Hotel on Long Island under a manager named E. Clark King, and to a chef named King at the Bellevue in Philadelphia — all traditional attributions rather than documented ones, and the "King" of the name is as likely to be a surname as a title. By the time it reached books like this one it had come a long way down from the hotel dining room. The Metropolitan Cook Book was issued free to policyholders by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company as part of its public-health and thrift campaigns, and this version is a way to turn two cups of yesterday's boiled fowl into something that could be served to guests, with a canned pimento standing in for anything more elaborate.