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Pot Pie, Chicken

A savory dish of chicken pieces baked in a crust of flour, milk, butter, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Pot Pie, Chicken

Oven, in the book's wordsA gentle oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Boil the chicken pieces in enough water to cover them until almost tender.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of coarse sea salt when the chicken is half done.

Make the crust

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour, milk, butter, baking powder, and ¼ teaspoon of salt to make the crust.

  2. Roll the dough lightly and line a well-buttered pudding basin with it.

Assemble and cook

  1. Layer the chicken in the basin, seasoning each layer with salt, pepper, and a little flour.

  2. Cover the layers with the crust, tie a cloth over the top, and boil slowly for 1 hour.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Chicken + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,389 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the crust and thickens the dish as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the crust.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lightens the crust as it cooks.
Milk
Moistens the dough and adds softness and browning-friendly sugars.
Chicken
Provides the main protein and savoury flavour of the filling.

The step that matters

Boil slowly for 1 hour. A gentle simmer cooks the crust and chicken through without toughening the meat or breaking up the dough. A hard, rolling boil can make the chicken stringy and the crust waterlogged or ragged.

“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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