Tarteletter med høns i asparges

The story

Tarteletter, warm pastry cups filled with chicken in a creamy asparagus sauce, belong to the hot part of the Danish Easter lunch. The Local, an English-language news site in Denmark, calls them possibly the closest thing to a meat pie at the påskefrokost, notes that the open puff-pastry cups are bought ready-made in supermarkets, and lists chicken, asparagus, carrots and celery as the usual filling. That filling has its own name, høns i asparges, or chicken in asparagus, and the Danish food company Aarstiderne includes the dish in its Easter recipe guide beside ideas for dyeing eggs with beets, red onion and red cabbage. The lunch is a fairly recent custom: Lex, the Danish national encyclopedia, explains that it replaced the plain food of the fasting season as prosperity grew in the 1950s, and that it first marked the end of the long fast. In 2027 most Danes will sit down to it on Easter Sunday, March 28. Here the sauce is made with the poaching broth and the liquid from canned white asparagus. Make the filling ahead and fill the shells only at the table, two per guest.