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Veal or Chicken Pot-pie

A savory pie filled with stewed veal or chicken and gravy, topped with biscuit dough.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and biscuit match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 889 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Veal or Chicken Pot-pie

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the meat

  1. Stew the meat in fresh water for 2½ hours, ensuring it is well covered.

  2. Season the meat with coarse sea salt and black pepper when it is half done.

Make the topping and finish

  1. Prepare baking powder biscuit dough and cut it into shapes.

  2. Steam the biscuit dough over the meat for 30 minutes.

  3. Thicken the gravy with a mixture of flour and butter.

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. Flour + biscuittop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together889 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Veal + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,930 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  3. Pepper + biscuittop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together841 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + porktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Veal or chicken
Provides the main meat and savory flavor for the stew and gravy.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it cooks with the butter.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the gravy and helps it thicken smoothly with flour.
Baking powder biscuit dough
Forms the light, tender biscuit topping that is steamed over the meat.

The step that matters

Steam the biscuit dough over the meat for 30 minutes. The dough must be steamed rather than boiled so it cooks through and turns light and tender. Keeping the meat covered and the steam gentle helps the biscuits rise evenly without becoming soggy on the bottom.

“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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