Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Pie with Sweet Potatoes

A baked pie filled with chicken and sweet potatoes, topped with biscuit crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sweet potato and biscuit share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 21 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Chicken Pie with Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Place the cut-up chicken in a pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil, skimming as necessary.

  2. Add the sweet potatoes and stew until both the chicken and potatoes are tender.

Assemble and bake

  1. In a large pie dish lined with biscuit crust, layer the chicken and sweet potatoes alternately.

  2. Season with salt and pepper, and pour in the gravy from stewing.

  3. Cover with additional crust, making a hole in the top for steam to escape.

  4. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) until 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. Sweet potato + biscuittop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together21 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Sweet potato + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Pepper + biscuittop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together841 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Chicken + sweet potatotop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together320 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
Provides the savory meat and the stewing liquid that becomes the pie's gravy.
Sweet potatoes
Soften during stewing and add body, starchy sweetness and moisture to the filling.
Crust for pie
Forms the lined base and top that enclose the filling and brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Stewing the chicken and potatoes until tender. The filling must be fully tender before assembly, because the pie bakes only until the crust browns and will not soften firm meat or potatoes much further.

Swap the sweet potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pepper, butter, biscuit):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, butter, biscuit. 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.

You might also like

Sweet Potato CroquettesSweet Potato Croquettes53 recipesPotato BiscuitPotato Biscuit32 recipesChicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesPotato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipes