‘Very ritzy’: Victor Hirtzler’s chicken à la king really goes for it with a final flourish of black truffle. Those working with ready-cooked chicken should introduce it right at the end, rather than boiling it in the sauce, as in Hirtzler’s recipe, or it will end up as tough as old boots. If you’d prefer to prepare your chicken in some other way – barbecuing it, for example – you might like to marinade it briefly in cream, lemon juice and salt, first, as in the Cook’s Country recipe, because that, like the stock, will make it taste a bit more interesting. (This also keeps them pleasingly juicy cooking them in the sauce, as Cook’s Country magazine recommends, risks over-reducing it and leaving the dish dry.) If you’re using up leftovers, a mixture is fine, but if you’re starting from scratch, I’d recommend poaching breasts, as in Claiborne’s recipe, in chicken stock, as Andrews suggests, to give them a bit of help in the flavour department. Claiborne poaches a whole bird in stock and aromatics, which adds a certain grandeur to proceedings, though, given the creaminess of the sauce, I think sticking to leaner white meat, as recommended by the earliest recipe I find, from Paul Richard’s 1911 book The Lunch Room, as well as Cook’s Country magazine, Claiborne and a 1919 recipe from Victor Hirtzler’s Hotel St Francis San Francisco cookbook, is preferable, because dark meat, though undeniably tastier, is too rich and fatty for such a pairing. More commonly seen nowadays as a vehicle for excess cooked chicken, as in Constance Spry’s 1956 Cookery Book, the dish is even better made with chicken cooked expressly for the purpose. Then have it for dinner instead.Ĭraig Claiborne’s chicken à la king features poached white meat that’s ‘pleasantly juicy’. And if you’re ignoring the whole affair, you can, as Colman Andrews suggests in his book Everything on the Table, call it “diced chicken in egg-thickened white-pepper sherry-cream sauce with pimentos and mushrooms on toast, if it makes you feel more contemporary”. Which also makes it ideal for consumption around the television set, or at a street party, should either of those figure in your plans. But, though the dish seems to have been created in the restaurants of the US rather than the royal palaces of Europe (the legendary New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne remembered it as “standard party fare” during his 1920s Southern childhood), it’s still a sound choice for coronation celebrations.įirst, because the name fits, second, because both chicken and cream are perennial crowdpleasers, and third, because it’s perfect buffet fare – as the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Food and Drink in America notes, in its heyday, the dish was particularly popular in tearooms, because it “could be eaten in a most ladylike way without picking up a knife”. How the mighty have fallen: the boozy, truffle-laced treat of the early 20th century reduced to rubbery chicken in a floury white sauce by its close. D espite its regal branding, chicken à la king reminds me of school dinners.
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