Name: Chicken or Veal Pie
Ingredients: Chicken or veal, cut into small pieces; Gravy, enough to fill the dish; Pie crust (see recipe for Gayworthy Shortcake); Slice or two of ham, with most fat removed

Why it works: Chicken and ham are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,497 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Chicken or Veal Pie

Ingredients

Chicken or veal, cut into small pieces
Gravy, enough to fill the dish
Pie crust (see recipe for Gayworthy Shortcake)
Slice or two of ham, with most fat removed

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

Prepare a fricassee of chicken or veal according to your preferred recipe.
Make a pie crust using the Gayworthy Shortcake recipe.
If using ham, cook it with the veal in the fricassee for added flavor, but do not add too much to avoid excessive saltiness.

Assemble and bake

Arrange the pieces of meat in a deep baking dish, ensuring similar pieces are not in the same spot.
Fill the dish nearly to the top with gravy.
Cover with a round of pie crust and cut a hole in the center with an apple corer.
Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 30 to 45 minutes, 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.

Chicken + hamtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,497 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken or veal: Forms the main filling, providing the meat that is cooked into the fricassee and gravy.
Gravy: Fills the dish and keeps the meat moist as the pie bakes.
Pie crust: Forms the top cover that bakes to a golden brown, sealing in the filling.

“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.