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Oyster Chicken Pie

A savory pie with chicken, oysters, and a creamy sauce baked in a pie crust.

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 ↓

Oyster 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.

Prepare the filling

  1. Stew the chicken in as little boiling water as possible until cooked.

  2. Remove the chicken and thicken the cooking liquid with flour dissolved in cold milk.

  3. Add the oyster liquor to the thickened liquid and cook until it is as thick as cream.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour the mixture over the chicken in a pie dish lined with pie paste.

  2. Add butter, pepper, and salt before baking.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C).

  4. Ten minutes before the pie is done, lift the crust and add the oysters and cream.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

Chicken
Provides the main protein and body of the pie.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Oyster liquor
Adds savoury, briny flavour to the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the filling.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture to the filling.

The step that matters

Thickening the cooking liquid. Flour must be dissolved fully in cold milk before it meets the hot liquid, otherwise it clumps. Cooking the mixture until it is as thick as cream lets the starch swell and gelatinise, giving a sauce that holds together rather than running out of the pie.

“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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