The ultimate chicken pie recipe

Laurie Colwin wrote: ‘No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.’ It is one of my favourite quotes about cooking, mainly because it feels true: everything you cook is informed by other dishes, those that you’ve cooked, those that you’ve tasted or read about, the successes and the failures. In quiet moments of kitchen solitude, it is reassuring to know that there is an army of cooks behind me, each offering their experience, their recipes and books, a hand to hold when I feel uncertain.

I never feel the truth of Colwin’s words more than when I’m making a chicken pie. My chicken pie is an amalgamation of every chicken dish I’ve ever made. Inside that one pie is a debt of gratitude owed to all my favourite cooks and writers: a recipe by Anna Hedworth, proprietor of Newcastle’s Cook House, was my go-to chicken pie for years. It is so old that I can’t even find it any more. Diana Henry’s obsession with chicken thighs means that they are always the first joint I reach for. Kate Young’s chicken with tarragon (inspired by the dish in Anna Karenina) is such a simple but gorgeous dish that I now automatically throw a generous handful of the sweet herb into the sauce. The leeks that Nigella puts in her one-pot chicken and orzo turned me into a chicken-and-leek evangelist. Once I had tried Rosie Mackean’s method of retaining the skin and adding it to the filling, there was no going back.

This is, as is only right and proper in this column, an old-fashioned chicken pie: big chunks of meat, lots of soft, buttery leeks, smokey nuggets of bacon, all bound together with a roux-thickened sauce (a velouté, if we’re being fancy) woken up with white wine, and enriched with just a little cream at the end.