Our second article for this month's contest is presented by Valerie from the Land of the Waxhaws. By way of reminder, I am on vacation for the summer. Instead of more article re-runs, I thought we'd continue learning from you readers. (However, unless we have a deluge of articles, Saturdays and Sundays will still be reruns.) The writer of the best article each month will receive the PSD book of his/her choice.
My experience with chicken pot pies came in the form of the Banquet frozen Chicken Pot Pies. I
remember the weirdly textured chicken and chewy green peas, covered in a small amount of gravy.
Somehow, the top crust was under-cooked though properly vented, while the bottom crust was
over-baked…I’m not sure how that even happens.
When my husband suggested that I make Chicken Pie like his mother made, well, those memories of disappointing, previously frozen chicken pot pies sprang to mind. So, I set about making a home-made two crust chicken pot pie from a cookbook. It was good, he said, but not the chicken pie from his youth.
That pie, he recalled, was made with saltine crackers instead of pie crusts and did not contain any vegetables. Well, that sounded like sacrilege to me. Saltine crackers? No veggies? After several failed attempts at recreating the “Cracker” Pie from my husband’s memory, I was able to locate the original recipe in a local church-published cookbook.
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Ruby’s Chicken Pie
2 cups cooked chicken
1 sleeve saltine crackers
¼ cup butter or margarine
1 cup milk
2 cups broth
¼ cup, heaping, all-purpose flour (no substitutions)
1 tablespoon Wyler’s chicken granules
Salt and pepper, to taste
Over moderate heat using a heavy pan, make a roux (gravy) by adding flour to the melted butter
and stirring constantly until flour is a beautiful reddish brown. Add milk and broth, stirring well until
thickened. Add chicken granules and seasonings. In a baking pan layer crackers, chicken, crackers, and
chicken. Cover with roux. Top with crackers. Bake in 350-degree oven for 30 minutes or until bubbly
and light brown. One pan of roux for 8 x 8 pan and two pans of roux for 9 x 13 pan.
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The recipe assumes that you would cook the fresh chicken pieces and debone the meat. It is a tasty recipe. I serve canned green peas on the side. Easy to prepare once the chicken was cooked. I’ve often wondered if the original recipe was a variation of the Moravian Chicken Pie from Winston-Salem, NC, which is popular with church fundraisers in my state.(1)
It could easily be prepared with pantry staples. Please enjoy my version of Chicken Pie, or
Cracker Pie, as my family knows it.
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Chicken Pie aka Cracker Pie – TEOTWAWKI-tized
2 c. cooked chicken (1 pint home-canned chicken or a 12.5 oz. commercially canned chicken, drained,
reserve broth)
1 sleeve saltine crackers
¼ cup butter or margarine (You may be able to use coconut oil and butter powder in the place of butter or margarine, but I haven’t tried it yet; my family is Team Butter.)
1 cup water
1/3 – ½ cup dry milk powder (enough to make 1 cup milk depending upon the dry milk that you stored)
2 cups reserved canned chicken broth, plus enough water to make 2 cups
¼ cup, heaping, all-purpose flour (no substitutions)
3 tablespoons Wyler’s chicken granules, divided (add 2 tablespoons to the chicken broth/water mix and add 1 tablespoon for gravy)
Salt and pepper, to taste
Mix the chicken granules with the water/reserved broth. Mix the dry milk powder with the
water. The roux and final assembly directions are the same as in the original recipe.
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(1) https://www.southernfoodways.org/dont-call-it-a-pot-pie-2/
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