Lattice-Top Chicken Stew

Two weeks until Joy moves. Fourteen days that feel like both an eternity and an instant, the way all countdowns feel when the thing you are counting toward is both necessary and heartbreaking. I have been packing Joy's things — her clothes, her art supplies, her collection of painted cards that she has made for every family member on every occasion for thirty years. The collection fills a box. The box is the archive of a woman's love expressed through glitter and crayon and the complete absence of irony.

Joy does not pack. Joy does not understand packing. What Joy understands is that something is happening and that the something involves her purple bedding and her paints and the promise that I will visit on Saturdays and bring peach cobbler. The understanding is sufficient. The sufficiency is the grace that Joy has always offered the world: she takes what you give her and she finds it enough, and the finding is the lesson, and the lesson is one I am still learning.

Mama has been agitated this week — not the quiet agitation of confusion but the loud agitation of resistance. She asks where Joy is going. I tell her. She asks again. I tell her again. The cycle repeats, and each repetition is a new telling, a new hearing, a new moment of distress that passes and returns and passes and returns like a wave on a shore that is being slowly eroded by the very water it faces. Ruth helps. Ruth's calm is a counterbalance to the agitation, and the balance is fragile and essential and maintained by the daily effort of a woman who is paid to care and who cares beyond what she is paid for.

I made Mama's chicken pastry — the dish that is the Lowcountry's answer to chicken pot pie but better, flatter, made with strips of pastry dough rather than a crust. Mama taught me this dish when I was twelve, in the Beaufort parsonage, on a Wednesday evening when Daddy was at a deacons' meeting and Joy was doing homework and the kitchen belonged to the two of us, mother and daughter, learning the pastry by feel. The dish is pure comfort. The comfort is earned. And the earning is the thirty-five years of cooking that separate the twelve-year-old girl at the counter from the forty-eight-year-old woman at the stove, still making the same dish, still finding comfort in the making.

The chicken pastry I describe in these pages — Mama’s, the Beaufort parsonage version, the one I have been making for thirty-five years — lives closest in spirit to this lattice-top chicken stew: a thick, savory filling blanketed in strips of tender pastry dough, the kind of dish that doesn’t need to explain itself. I’ve written it out here the way I make it now, adapted for a standard kitchen but true to what Mama put on the table when comfort was the only thing on the menu. If you are counting down days toward something hard, I recommend making this. The pastry takes patience. The patience is the point.

Prep Time: 30 minutes | Cook Time: 55 minutes | Total Time: 1 hour 25 minutes | Servings: 6

Ingredients

2 lbs boneless, skinless chicken thighs or breasts, cut into bite-sized pieces
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 medium yellow onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
3 medium carrots, sliced into rounds
3 stalks celery, sliced
1/2 cup frozen peas
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
3 cups low-sodium chicken broth
1/2 cup whole milk
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon dried sage
Salt and black pepper to taste
1 package (14 oz) refrigerated pie crust dough, or homemade pastry dough rolled thin
1 egg, beaten (for egg wash)

Instructions

Cook the chicken. Season chicken pieces with salt and pepper. In a large oven-safe skillet or Dutch oven over medium-high heat, melt 1 tablespoon of butter and cook chicken until lightly browned, about 5–6 minutes. Remove and set aside.
Build the base. In the same pan, melt remaining 2 tablespoons butter over medium heat. Add onion, carrots, and celery and cook until softened, about 7 minutes. Add garlic and cook 1 minute more.
Make the roux. Sprinkle flour over the vegetables and stir to coat. Cook for 1–2 minutes, stirring constantly, until the flour smells slightly nutty.
Add the broth. Slowly pour in chicken broth while stirring to prevent lumps. Add milk, thyme, and sage. Return chicken to the pan. Simmer over medium-low heat for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the stew thickens. Stir in frozen peas. Taste and adjust salt and pepper.
Preheat oven. Heat oven to 400°F (200°C).
Cut the lattice strips. Roll out pastry dough on a lightly floured surface to about 1/8-inch thickness. Using a sharp knife or pastry wheel, cut dough into strips approximately 1 inch wide.
Top the stew. Lay pastry strips over the surface of the stew in a lattice pattern — alternating horizontal and vertical strips, weaving them gently if desired, or simply laying them in a crosshatch. Brush the pastry with beaten egg.
Bake. Transfer the pan to the oven and bake for 25–30 minutes, until the lattice is golden brown and the filling is bubbling around the edges. Let rest 10 minutes before serving.

Nutrition (per serving)

Lattice-Top Chicken Stew — The Dish That Holds a Family Together