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Chicken Pie

A savory pie filled with boiled chicken, mushrooms, eggs, and a sauce of butter, flour, Worcestershire, lemon peel, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,172 recipes. Both carry 1-butyl acetate, which smells fruity, banana. The science ↓

Chicken Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the jelly

  1. Boil the chicken until tender, then remove the bones.

  2. Return the bones to the boiling water, adding onion, salt, and pepper.

  3. Boil down, strain, and chill to make chicken jelly.

  4. Cut the chicken meat into small pieces.

Make the filling

  1. Melt butter in a pan. Add flour and stir until combined.

  2. Add the chicken jelly, chicken meat, mushrooms, chopped eggs, Worcestershire sauce, lemon peel, and sherry. Mix well.

Bake

  1. Line a pie dish with crusts. Pour in the chicken mixture.

  2. Cover with a light crust.

  3. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until the crust is golden brown.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Chicken + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-butyl acetate (fruity, banana).

  2. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  4. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the meat and, through its bones, the jelly that moistens the filling.
Flour
Cooked with butter into a roux that thickens the filling.
Hard boiled eggs
Add body and richness to the filling as they are chopped through it.
Mushrooms
Add moisture and savoury depth to the filling.
Butter
Adds fat and richness and helps form the roux with the flour.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aroma to the filling.

The step that matters

Adding the flour to the butter. Stirring the flour into melted butter and cooking it briefly forms a roux. Stirring until smooth prevents lumps and lets the flour thicken the filling evenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pepper, butter, flour, mushroom, egg, sauce):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, butter, flour, mushroom, egg, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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