Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Pie

A baked pie with boiled chicken, broth, biscuit dough, butter, flour, salt, pepper, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. 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 chicken

  1. Cut up the chickens.

  2. Boil the chickens in broth until tender.

Make the dough

  1. Make a rich baking powder biscuit dough.

  2. Roll the dough thin.

Assemble the pie

  1. Line the sides of a deep 4-quart basin with the dough.

  2. Add the chicken pieces to the basin.

  3. Sprinkle the chicken with salt.

  4. Sprinkle the chicken with pepper.

  5. Add lumps of butter to the chicken.

  6. Drop small pieces of dough onto the chicken.

  7. Thicken the broth with 1 tablespoon of flour.

  8. Pour enough gravy over the chicken to cover it.

  9. Roll out a piece of dough ½ inch thick to cover the pie.

  10. Cut small holes in the dough for steam to escape.

  11. Wet the edge of the dough to ensure it sticks.

Bake

  1. Bake for 30 minutes at 400°F (200°C).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  4. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

Chickens
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender from long simmering in broth.
Broth
Cooks the chicken and, thickened with flour, forms the moist gravy filling.
Baking powder
Lifts the biscuit dough so it bakes light and tender rather than dense.
Flour
Thickens the broth into a gravy that holds the filling together.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that enrich the filling and dough flavour.

The step that matters

Wet the edge of the dough to ensure it sticks. A dry edge will not bond to the bottom crust, so steam and gravy can leak out during baking and the pie can come apart. Moistening the seam helps the two layers seal.

“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.

More chicken pie recipes

Baked 7Crust 5with Oysters 5Oyster 5Puff Pastry 3 See all 355 →

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipesChicken PanadaChicken Panada75 recipes