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Chicken Pie

A savory pie made with chicken parts, pastry, butter, and onion, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,814 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. 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 filling

  1. Cover chicken parts with boiling water and stew until tender, adding salt.

  2. Make a rich baking powder pastry and line the bottom and sides of a pan, cutting slashes across the bottom.

  3. Place pieces of chicken in the pastry with butter and a bit of grated onion for flavor.

Bake and serve

  1. Add the cooking liquid and cover the top with thin pastry, cutting several slashes in the top to let juice escape.

  2. Brush the top with butter and bake at 400°F (200°C) until golden brown.

  3. Serve in the baking dish.

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

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

  2. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Back, neck, and giblets of chicken
Provides the main meat and, as it stews, the flavorful cooking liquid for the filling.
Baking powder pastry
Forms the rich crust that holds the filling and bakes golden on the bottom and top.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and browns the top crust when brushed on.
Grated onion
Adds aromatic flavor to the chicken filling.

The step that matters

Cutting slashes in the top crust. Slashes let steam and juice escape during baking; without them, pressure can build under the pastry and cause it to split or turn soggy.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Onionthe original
  3. Leekfits less well
  4. Tomatofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter. 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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