A Chicken à la King That's Actually Fit for a King
After leaving the Navy in 1946, a 25-year-old Craig Claiborne moved into a small Chicago apartment to begin his civilian life working in advertising and public relations. During that time, as Claiborne writes in his memoir, 'A Feast Made for Laughter,' he cooked meals for himself from an edition of 'The Joy of Cooking' his sister gave him for Christmas, along with a chafing dish he lugged home through the snow.
Recipe: Chicken à la King
Whenever I think of chafing dishes and 'The Joy of Cooking,' I think of a metal tray kept warm by a small flame, filled with what I call hotel or buffet chicken, colloquially known as creamed chicken — and officially chicken à la king. Like Salisbury steak and green-bean casserole, the regal midcentury favorite of tender poached chicken, usually breast meat, in a creamy sherry sauce is a foggy window into our nation's past. Some call the dish comforting, like potpie without the filling; others recoil at the memory of cafeteria gloop, the most dreaded hot lunch at school. This newspaper called it 'the entree that wouldn't die.' Michael Cecchi-Azzolina, who grew up in Brooklyn in the 1960s and early '70s, remembers chicken à la king as diner food: white bread, cream of mushroom soup, maybe some frozen peas and carrots. 'It was a Swanson dinner,' he said, adding later: 'But people loved it.' At his West Village bar and grill, Cecchi's, he serves an updated take, with brandy and dry vermouth in place of the sherry and a half moon of puff pastry perched on top.
I had totally forgotten about chicken à la king until recently, when I saw it in an airport lounge. I won't say that the metal chafing dish of chicken smothered in a bell-peppery mushroom gravy particularly called to me; it was the only option. But as a weary traveler in need of protein, I ate it comfortably, happily, and it sustained me for hours as home cooking does. I spent the next few months researching this chicken 'king' and cooking from old cookbooks, and I concluded that most once-fashionable menu items that feel outdated today maybe didn't have enough cheerleaders along the way. Sherry and egg yolks stirred into a mushroom cream sauce with chicken stock is an umami powerhouse with oodles of potential. As James Beard writes in his 'American Cookery,' chicken à la king is often 'prepared in mediocre fashion,' but the original 'is really quite good if done with care and fine ingredients.' Beard adds that a chafing dish 'can kill even the best of food.'
It probably tasted pretty good in the 19th century, in fancy hotels where its modern iteration is said to have originated, with several hotel chefs, including George Greenwald of the Brighton Beach Hotel, laying claim to it. Canonically, in even older French cookbooks, you can find evidence of creamy recipes with the appendage 'à la reine,' sometimes a reference to the pastry crown or nest serving as both vessel and carbohydrate for the mushroomy chicken. Such supposedly simple preparations, as Beard noted, will, of course, taste as good as the ingredients used to make them. This very good iteration comes from Claiborne, adapted from a column he wrote for The New York Times in 1969. I cooked it one night with meat pulled from a beautiful, organic, corn-hued heritage bird that I braised myself (so I could use the rich stock to thin out the cream). Another night, with big-box supermarket chicken breasts. A third night, the mauled remains of a rotisserie chicken. They all had their merits, each variation a dot on the effort-to-reward matrix.
Chicken à la king won't win you any awards, but cooking through Claiborne's recipe will present to you many rewards. You'll feel as if you've stepped into the past, going through the motions of the proverbial American ancestors, the ones who were consistently seduced by French cooking but adapted its lessons to the new land. John Birdsall, whose new book, 'What Is Queer Food?: How We Served a Revolution,' comes out in June, pointed out to me over email that the extravagant amount of cream in the Times recipe matches Claiborne's writing voice and persona, as well as what he wrote about creamed dishes in 'Craig Claiborne's Kitchen Primer' from the same year: that the rule of thumb is one cup of cream sauce to two cups of solids (chicken, ham, vegetables). Though you might look at the full cup of heavy cream and clutch your pearls, note that it's thinned out with chicken stock, as in a velouté (meaning 'velvety'), one of the French mother sauces. It's not the kind of sauce I would leave in a chafing dish for hours, but ladled fresh over toast points or steamed rice? That's a fine dinner.
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