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Chicken Pie

A savory pie with boiled chicken, biscuit dough, and thickened broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and biscuit match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 889 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Chicken Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Boil the chickens in broth until thoroughly cooked.

Make the crust

  1. Make a rich baking powder biscuit dough by mixing flour, baking powder, salt, and butter until crumbly.

  2. Roll the dough thin and line the sides of a deep 3-quart basin.

Assemble the pie

  1. Place the cooked chicken pieces in the basin, sprinkle with salt, pepper, and small lumps of butter.

  2. Drop in small pieces of the biscuit dough.

  3. Thicken the broth with 1 tablespoon of flour and pour enough to cover the chicken.

  4. Roll out another piece of dough to ½ inch thick and cover the pie, making holes for steam to escape.

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. Flour + biscuittop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together889 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Biscuit + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together841 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main cooked meat that forms the body of the pie.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the biscuit dough and thickens the broth into a sauce.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough so the biscuit pieces rise and turn light.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the biscuit dough tender and rich.
Broth
Supplies moisture and savory flavor for the filling.

The step that matters

Thicken the broth with flour. Flour must be fully mixed into the hot broth so it does not clump, and it needs to simmer so the starch swells and thickens the liquid and the raw flour taste cooks off.

“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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