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Chicken Pie

A savory pie filled with chicken, veal, ham, and optional forcemeat, topped with puff pastry and served with a thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 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 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Cut up the young fowls as needed for your pie.

  2. Season the joints with white pepper, coarse sea salt, mace, and nutmeg.

  3. Place the seasoned pieces into a pie dish with thin slices of fresh ham, veal chops, or veal udder.

  4. Add forcemeat balls and yolks of hard-boiled eggs if desired.

Make the gravy

  1. Make a gravy by boiling knuckle or scrag of veal or shanks of mutton with white peppercorns, onions, and parsley until it thickens.

  2. Strain the gravy and pour it over the pie filling.

Bake

  1. Cover the pie with rich puff pastry and bake at 400°F (200°C) for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

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

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. White pepper + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Ham + muttontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together430 recipes

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

  5. Veal + muttontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,394 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-nonanal (fatty, waxy).

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

What each ingredient does

Young fowls
Form the main body of the pie filling and supply the meat that cooks through in the oven.
Knuckle or scrag of veal
Boiled to make the gravy, releasing gelatin that thickens and enriches the liquid.
Shanks of mutton
Simmered with the veal to build a richer, more savory gravy base.
Rich puff pastry
Forms a crisp, flaky top crust that browns in the oven and seals in the filling.
Veal udder
Adds soft, tender texture and richness to the pie filling.

The step that matters

Strain and pour the gravy over the filling. Gravy poured in too early or too hot can make the pastry soggy and the filling watery. Straining removes bits that would cloud the gravy, and it should be added before the pastry goes on so the liquid sets as the pie cooks.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (white pepper, mace, nutmeg, ham, veal, egg, mutton):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against white pepper, mace, nutmeg, ham, veal, egg, mutton. 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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