Throwback Thursday: An old-fashioned chicken and mushroom pie

Does anything say Baby It’s Cold Outside better than a big slice of chicken and mushroom pie straight from the oven? A warm hug that reminds you of your mom’s good night kiss on the forehead, the smile you smile as she closes your bedroom door and you nod off to sleep.

“Bless your little cotton socks,” my mother used to say to me when I was a little boy. An alternative to the “sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite” narrative. Remembering that got me thinking about the pies she used to make us for supper, and that took me on a meander down the valley of memory lane devoted to all the pies I’ve ever eaten.

And this is the thing about pies: they have to be like that warm hug, and have to be just right. 

We all hate those commercial pies that just don’t get the filling right. Often the crust of a commercial pie looks marvellous. They look right because that’s how they sell them to us. You’ve just got to bite into the pie, look at that pastry! 

And then you buy it, and bite into it, and… thud. Slop. Gloopy sort-of-sauce where the chicken or beef should be. Gristly something or other. What part of the chicken does that chewy thing come from? All I can guarantee is that it’s a part of the chicken that should have been cut off and thrown away before cooking or serving it. Or putting in, say, a pie.

The only commercial brand of pie I buy is called Shamrock and comes from East London. But at my local Karoo Express petrol station shop in Cradock, which sells them, I ask them what their Shamrock fillings are. And the inevitable answer is: “Steak. Pepper steak. Steak en kidney. Curry steak. En Steak Surprise.” Okay, I made up the last one. So, the choice is steak, steak, steak, steak or steak. Drives me absolutely nuts, and every time I’m there I ask them to PLEASE offer us more choice of fillings. It falls on deaf ears. Every time. ?

Having said that, the steak in all of them is tender and well-seasoned. So, once a week, that’s breakfast. Now and then they also have chicken, Cornish pasty, and a decent Shamrock sausage roll. But mostly not. I see online that they also have a factory shop in Cape Town now. They used to have a Shamrock chicken curry pie at my local, but that seems to have been cancelled for lack of interest. A pity: it was my favourite Shamrock filling.

I don’t know the Shamrock people, for the record, I’m just giving credit where it’s due.

Read more in Daily Maverick: What’s cooking today: Kreatopita (Greek country pie)

But there’s another way to guarantee that your pie will be just right: make it yourself. Make it the way mom or gran used to make it. But how?

The pastry part is easy: make it yourself, but there’s no need to be ashamed of using commercial frozen pastry. They are products to be trusted, and even world-famous rock-star chefs will tell you the same.

It’s the filling that you need to pay attention to. That’s the part of a pie that you make from scratch. By cooking the beef, or the chicken, the pork  or the lamb or even the mutton, until it is richly flavoured and the meat perfectly tender.

That is how I approached my pie for this Throwback Thursday: it would be a chicken and mushroom with the kind of filling you hope to find when you buy that commercial pie with its beautiful pastry that does not deliver when you bite into it. No thud here.

Some key points:

• There’s wine in the filling: white and of decent quality;


• The mushrooms must be cooked down until they release their juices, then those juices must be cooked away. This is the point at which the mushrooms will be nutty and at their flavour peak. And that, in one paragraph, is the key to cooking a mushroom.


• A pie filling needs herbs and/or spices. Or both: and this one has both thyme and nutmeg.


• Finally, the result in this case was that the sauce aspect of the filling (which carries all the flavour) was deeply delicious yet, interestingly, its taste was an amalgam of everything in it. As Marcella Hazan said of the perfect minestrone: you should taste none of the individual aromatics, only the composite taste of them all. I was so chuffed with this result.