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Chicken Pie

A savory pie with a lard-based dough filled with cooked chicken and its gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and chicken are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,389 recipes. Both carry 1-hexanal, which smells fruit. The science ↓

Chicken Pie

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.

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix flour, baking powder, lard, and salt.

  2. Add milk gradually to form a soft dough.

Prepare the filling

  1. Stew the chicken and remove it from the bones, cutting it into small pieces.

  2. Thicken the gravy in which the chicken was cooked.

Assemble and bake

  1. Line a baking dish with half of the dough.

  2. Fill the dish with the chicken and gravy mixture.

  3. Cover with the remaining dough and seal the edges.

  4. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven 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. Milk + chickentop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,389 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + chickentop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,559 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the dough once mixed with liquid.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven so the crust rises and becomes light.
Lard
Adds fat that keeps the crust tender and flaky.
Milk
Hydrates the flour so the dough holds together softly.
Cooked chicken
Provides the main savory filling.
Gravy from cooked chicken
Supplies moisture and flavor that binds the filling together.

The step that matters

Seal the edges. If the top crust is not sealed well to the bottom crust, the gravy can leak and escape during baking, leaving the filling dry and the pie poorly held together.

“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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