As sure as eggs is eggs, what was once comfort food will be reinvented as fine dining. Lancashire hotpots will be turned fancy, served with teapots of lamb jus. Fish and chips will become canapés, spritzed with atomisers filled with malt vinegar. French onion soup will be served in teeny-tiny shots; Scotch eggs gussied beyond recognition. I once ate a (large and unwieldy) single bite of shepherd’s pie from a Chinese soup spoon at a posh party. Chefs just can’t resist the joke.
Chicken à la king – chicken braised in a cream sauce with onions, mushroom and peppers – has gone in the opposite direction, from fine dining to comfort food. It always had what is needed for the most satisfying home-cooked dishes: it is straightforward in both technique and ingredients, is both rich but simply flavoured, and its creamy base makes it the kind of dish you could eat from a bowl with a spoon in front of a boxset.
But that’s not how it began. Chicken à la king – as its name suggests – became a favourite in hotel dining rooms at the turn of the century, though exactly where it was invented is uncertain. It was aspirational.
There has always been a vogue for naming dishes after royals and nobility – Victoria sponge, prinsesstårta, Battenberg cake, crèpes Suzette, Charlotte russe – but there’s something a little basic about calling something ‘chicken à la king’. There’s a bit of ‘That’ll do!’ about the whole thing. In any case, there are a host of recipes that are known as ‘chicken à la king’ or ‘chicken à la reine’, dating as far back as 1665, bearing little resemblance to the dish we know today.
A more likely explanation is that ‘king’ is actually a bastardisation of ‘Keene’, a surname which a clutch of chefs or patrons held during the turn of the century, the time of its likely inception. Despite its macaronic name, chicken à la king is more likely to have its origins in New York, London or Philadelphia than in Paris.
In any event, since the early 1900s the name has meant the same thing: chicken, mushrooms and peppers in a cream sauce. It became a mainstay of upscale hotels, and had its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s. But just a few years later, the dish had fallen out of favour. ‘There was a time – in the 1950s, say, when the whole country seemed to be awash in chicken à la king,’ the food writer Calvin Trillin wrote in the Nation in 1985. ‘I’ve been wondering for a long time where all the chicken à la king went. A few years ago, I began to think that the government might have it stored somewhere – in huge silos, maybe, or in those salt caves in Kansas where they keep surplus rutabagas.’
Far be it from me to contradict Trillin 40 years after he wrote that, but I’m not so sure it did disappear. Could it be that it disappeared from restaurants and dinner parties, but was reborn in its comfort form, going under the radar on many a kitchen table?
Whether you dress it up or down, chicken simmered in cream, stock and sherry is going to be delicious
If you think of this as comfort food, you might well serve it with noodles – thick pasta ribbons – or American-style biscuits. To put it in the fine-dining camp, it needs something a little more refined. Toast triangles, thinly sliced and with the crusts removed, are a classic accompaniment.
Really it doesn’t matter. Whether you dress it up or down, chicken simmered in cream, stock and sherry is always going to be delicious. So for my version I’ve decided to straddle the two camps. A large, plated vol au vent is the vehicle for a rich, velvety, saucy braise that is both fancy and deeply comforting. Shallots bring a gentler, sweeter flavour than onions, while oyster mushrooms have fantastic depth of flavour while losing none of the comfort. A slosh of sherry instantly brings an old-fashioned, Proustian flavour to a chicken dish. And I’m not a stock purist, but this is the kind of dish where the sauce has a starring role, and really great stock will make that sauce shine. If you can’t get your hands on any, the chicken poaching liquid is a good substitute.
Serves: 4
Hands-on time: 20 minutes
Cooks: 40 minutes
- 2 large chicken breasts
- 400g puff pastry
- 1 egg yolk
- 2 shallots, finely diced
- 150g oyster mushrooms, chopped
- 1 green pepper, finely diced
- 250ml double cream
- 40g butter
- 60ml sherry
- 500ml chicken stock
- 2 tbsp flat leaf parsley, chopped
- Place the stock (or water) in a saucepan, add the chicken, bring it to a boil, then reduce to a gentle simmer. Cook for ten minutes, then check that the chicken is cooked through; the meat should be completely white, with no pink. Remove the chicken from the stock, keeping both separately.
- Preheat the oven to 220°C/200°C fan. On a floured worktop, roll out the pastry until it is 4-5mm thick. Cut out eight discs of puff pastry about 10cm across. Cut a hole measuring 6cm in the middle of four of the discs, turning half the discs into rings. Brush the edge of the discs with egg yolk, and line a ring up on top of each disc. Brush the top with egg yolk and prick the centre of each disc with a fork. Place on a lined baking tray and bake for 20 minutes.
- Meanwhile, melt the butter in a large, heavy-bottomed pan. Add the shallots and let them soften. Increase the heat and add the mushrooms and green peppers – they should sizzle and release some of their liquid.
- Dice the chicken into chunks of about 1.5cm, and add these to the pan. Add the sherry, and let it reduce by half. Pour in the cream and stock, bring to a boil, then lower the heat; simmer for ten minutes, until the sauce coats the back of a spoon. Season and stir the parsley through the chicken mixture, and spoon it all generously into the pastry cases. Serve hot.
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