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Chicken Pie

A savory pie made with boiled chicken, salt pork, onion, and a dough crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pork and beef match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Chicken Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Cut each chicken into six portions.

  2. Boil the chicken with the salt pork, onion, and seasonings until tender.

  3. Thicken the broth with a little flour, season to taste, and pour into a baking dish.

Make and add the crust

  1. Make a dough with flour, baking powder, minced beef suet, salt, and enough milk.

  2. Cover the chicken mixture with the dough. Alternatively, line the baking dish with the dough, bake it, fill with chicken, and cover with a top crust before baking again.

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. Pork + beeftop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Chicken + porktop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,417 recipes

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

  3. Chicken + beeftop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,148 recipes

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

  4. Onion + beeftop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Chickens
Provide the main meat and, as they cook, the broth that forms the filling.
Flour
Thickens the broth into a body-rich gravy and gives the dough its structure.
Beef suet
Adds fat to the dough, keeping the crust tender and flaky as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough, helping it rise and lighten as it bakes.
Salt pork
Adds savory fat and flavor to the broth as the chicken cooks.

The step that matters

Thickening the broth before adding the crust. Flour must be stirred into the hot broth in a small amount at a time, or it clumps. Smooth thickening gives a gravy that holds together under the crust instead of turning watery or lumpy.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pork, onion, flour, beef, milk):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pork, onion, flour, beef, milk. 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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