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Baked Chicken Pie

A baked pie filled with stewed chicken and a puff pastry crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Baked Chicken Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Place the chicken pieces in a pot and cover with water. Add butter, salt, and pepper.

  2. Stew the chicken until cooked through.

  3. Stir 1 tablespoon of flour with water and mix it into the stewed chicken.

Make the crust

  1. In a bowl, mix 2 cups of flour with ½ cup of lard to make a rich puff paste.

  2. Roll out a piece of the puff paste and line a baking pan.

  3. Pour the chicken mixture into the lined baking pan.

  4. Roll out another piece of dough for the top crust, butter it, sprinkle with flour, and roll again.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the top crust on the pie, twist pieces of dough across the top, and make rings between them.

  2. Pierce the center with a fork and press the edges with the fork.

  3. Bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) until golden brown.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Butter and flour 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

Chicken
Provides the main protein and savory body of the filling, becoming tender as it stews.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the stewed chicken and helps the crust brown.
All-purpose flour
Forms the gluten structure of the puff paste that holds the pie together.
Lard
Creates flaky layers in the puff paste by keeping pieces of fat separate from the dough.
Flour
Thickens the chicken cooking liquid into a stable filling.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and water into the stewed chicken. Flour mixed in cold water must be stirred smoothly into the hot liquid, or it forms lumps and the filling thickens unevenly.

“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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