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Chicken Pot-pie

A chicken stew with biscuit dumplings cooked in a thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 Pot-pie

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chicken

  1. Place a small plate in the bottom of a kettle.

  2. Add the chicken pieces and cover with hot water.

  3. Season generously with butter, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

Make the dumplings and gravy

  1. Half an hour before serving, drop in small lumps of biscuit dough made from the flour.

  2. Cover closely and cook for 20 to 25 minutes.

  3. Carefully remove the dumplings with a skimmer and place on a platter.

  4. If the gravy is not thick enough, mix a small spoon of flour with water until smooth and add to the gravy.

  5. Pour the thickened gravy over the chicken and dumplings.

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

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

Chicken
Provides the main protein and flavour that the broth and gravy are built on.
All-purpose flour
Forms the biscuit dough dumplings and thickens the gravy when mixed with water.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour through the chicken and gravy.

The step that matters

Adding the dumplings. Dough dropped into simmering liquid needs a covered, steady cook to rise and set through the middle. Lifting the lid or boiling too hard can make them heavy or break them apart.

“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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