Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Pie

A baked chicken pie with puff pastry, seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg, mace, and filled with stock, wine, pickles, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and mace 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 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the chicken

  1. Pick, clean and singe the chicken.

  2. If the chicken is young, keep it whole. If the chicken is large, cut it into joints.

  3. Remove the skin from the chicken.

  4. Wash and dry the chicken pieces.

Season and assemble

  1. Season the chicken with salt, white pepper, nutmeg, and mace.

  2. If the chicken is whole, place a bit of butter rolled in flour and some mixed spices inside it.

  3. Arrange the chicken in a dish with the livers, gizzards, and hearts, all well seasoned.

  4. Add white stock, white wine, lemon pickle or pickled mushrooms, and hard-boiled egg yolks.

Bake

  1. Cover the dish with puff pastry.

  2. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 1 hour.

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. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. White pepper + macetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Forms the main body of the pie, becoming tender and savoury as it cooks in the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour, and with flour helps thicken the juices.
Flour
Thickens the stock and juices into a light sauce when combined with butter.
White stock
Provides liquid that cooks the chicken and forms the base of the sauce.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Enrich the sauce with richness and a smooth, creamy body.
Puff pastry
Forms a flaky, golden crust that seals and covers the filling.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, nutmeg, mace, butter, flour, white wine, lemon):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, nutmeg, mace, butter, flour, white wine, lemon. 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.

More chicken pie recipes

Baked 7Crust 5with Oysters 5Oyster 5Puff Pastry 3 See all 355 →

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipes