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Chicken Pie

A baked pie filled with chicken, mushrooms, eggs, and seasonings, encased in pie crusts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,172 recipes. Both carry 1-butyl acetate, which smells fruity, banana. 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 jelly

  1. Boil the chicken until tender, then remove the bones.

  2. Return the bones to the boiling water, adding onion, salt, and pepper.

  3. Boil down, strain, and chill to make chicken jelly.

  4. Cut the chicken meat into small pieces.

Make the filling

  1. Melt butter in a pan, add flour, and stir until combined.

  2. Add the chicken jelly, chopped chicken, mushrooms with their liquor, chopped hard boiled eggs, Worcestershire sauce, lemon peel, and sherry. Mix well.

Bake and serve

  1. Line a pie dish with crusts, pour in the chicken mixture, and cover with a light crust.

  2. Bake in a 400°F (200°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. Chicken + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-butyl acetate (fruity, banana).

  2. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  4. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the meat for the filling and, simmered with bones, the jelly that moistens it.
Flour
Cooked with butter and combined with the jelly to thicken the filling into a sauce.
Hard boiled eggs
Add body and richness to the filling as they are chopped fine and mixed in.
Mushrooms
Add savory flavor and moisture through their included liquor.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the flour base of the filling.

The step that matters

Chill the chicken jelly before using it. Chilling and straining the boiled-down stock lets it set into a jelly, which gives the filling body and keeps it from running out of the pie when baked.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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