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Chicken and Ham Pie

A savory pie filled with stewed chicken and ham, topped with puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 and Ham 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. Stew the chicken joints with the onion for 30 minutes.

  2. Season with pepper and salt.

Assemble the pie

  1. Remove the chicken and place it in a pie dish, layering with slices of ham.

  2. Thicken the gravy with cornflour and pour it over the meat.

  3. Let the mixture cool, then cover with rough puff pastry.

Bake

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until the pastry is cooked.

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

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

  3. Chicken + hamtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,497 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  5. Onion + hamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,159 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

Chicken
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender as it stews.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty flavour layered through the filling.
Cornflour
Thickens the gravy so it holds together rather than running out of the pie.
Rough puff pastry
Forms the flaky, golden crust that encloses the filling.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before covering with pastry. A hot filling melts the butter in rough puff pastry before it can set, so the crust turns greasy and fails to rise. Cooling the filling first keeps the layers intact in the oven.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits about as well
  3. Mustardfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, ham. 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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