Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Pie

A sweet pie made with cooked chicken, raisins, butter, sugar, and a flour crust.

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

Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Chicken Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Cook the chickens until tender.

  2. Remove the large bones from the chickens.

  3. Season the chickens with salt and pepper while cooking.

Make the crust

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour and baking powder thoroughly.

  2. Add a little salt to the flour mixture.

  3. Rub in the butter until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs.

  4. Add enough milk to moisten the dough.

  5. Roll the dough out.

Assemble and top

  1. Line a 6-quart pan with the crust.

  2. Place the chicken inside the pan.

  3. Sprinkle the raisins, butter, and sugar over the chicken.

  4. Fill the pan halfway with the broth from the cooked chickens.

  5. Sprinkle the top with 1 cup of flour.

  6. Add the top crust.

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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Chicken + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,389 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

Chickens
Provide the main meat and the broth that moistens the filling.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the dough and the crust topping.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough so the crust rises and lightens.
Unsalted butter
Rubbed into the flour to make the crust tender and flaky.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture to the filling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the filling taste balanced against the savory chicken.

The step that matters

Rub in the butter until coarse crumbs form. Cold fat coated in flour stays in small pieces that melt during baking, leaving pockets that make the crust tender and flaky. Overworking the dough develops gluten, which makes it tough.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pepper, flour, butter, milk, sugar):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Vanillafits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, flour, butter, milk, sugar. 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 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipesChicken PanadaChicken Panada75 recipes