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Chicken Pie

A savory pie filled with stewed chicken, hard‑boiled eggs, and butter‑flour mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour 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

Prepare the chicken

  1. Wash the chickens and cut them up.

  2. Stew the chickens with water, salt, and mace until done.

Assemble the pie

  1. Make a pie crust and line the sides of a pie dish with it.

  2. Add the stewed chickens to the dish and season with pepper, salt, and hard-boiled eggs.

  3. Mix in the butter rolled in flour and pour in some of the cooking liquid.

  4. Cover with the top crust, cut a hole in the center, and turn back the crust to let steam escape.

  5. Place a small cup in the middle of the pie.

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. Butter + flourtop 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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

Butter and flour 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 as it stews in liquid.
Butter rolled in flour
Flour thickens the cooking liquid into a rich, smooth sauce, and butter adds richness.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add body and richness to the filling as they are mixed through the chicken.

The step that matters

Cover with the top crust and vent it. The small hole and the cup let steam escape, so the filling does not build pressure and push the crust apart or make the crust soggy from trapped moisture.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

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

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