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Dessert

Chicken Pie

A savory pie filled with chicken, sausage or forcemeat, hard boiled eggs, herbs, and spices, baked in pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

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. Cut the chickens into joints, skin them, and remove the bones.

  2. Mix salt, cayenne, mace, nutmeg, sausage meat, hard boiled eggs, and minced herbs.

Assemble the pie

  1. Layer some of the mixture at the bottom of a pie dish.

  2. Add the chicken joints on top, followed by another layer of sausage meat or forcemeat.

  3. Fill the dish with alternate layers of chicken and forcemeat.

  4. Moisten with water or broth made from boiling the chicken bones.

Bake and serve

  1. Cover with pastry and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 2 hours.

  2. Glaze and serve hot or cold.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Chicken + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Chickens
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender during the long slow bake.
Sausage meat or forcemeat
Adds richness and fat, keeping the layered filling moist and savoury.
Hard boiled eggs
Add body and substance to the filling, giving slices a firm, pleasing texture.
Pastry for pie crust
Encloses the filling and forms a sealed crust that browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Moisten with water or broth. Liquid added before baking keeps the filling from drying out, since lean chicken and forcemeat lose moisture during the long bake and need it to stay tender.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, nutmeg, meat, egg. 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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