My most popular dish of all time has to be chicken and leek pie. It’s delicious.

The great thing about this pie is that you use pre-roasted chickens from the supermarket. One chicken does 4 pies, each for up to 6 people.

We also do them as 12-to-a-tray individual pies, and one chicken does about 40 of those.

Shred every skerrick of meat off the bones, and the skin, and the stuffing, in tasty morsels (“gobettes”). Supermarket chickens are now significantly smaller than they used to be!

If you’re in luck, leeks are in season (spring is best) and affordable. If not, you can use onions for half of this. For one chicken, allow three medium leeks. Slice the leeks lengthways then across in 5mm cuts. When the outer layer gets too green, discard, but you can go a bit further with the inner layers. Cook them gently in butter or olive oil.

You can’t really add much more vegetable filler with these pies, I often use thinly-sliced celery also slow cooked; medieval lovage is basically the same thing. Peas work well, noting that green peas weren’t much used in period.

You then make up a white sauce. For a classic thick sauce, that’s 60g of plain flour, same of butter, make a roux (pronounced “rew”) which is melted butter and flour cooked for a few minutes, then very slowly add 250 mL of milk. For these chicken tarts, I use about 350 mL of milk, for a runnier sauce, which is enough for one chicken in the proportions above. Then season to taste, with salt, pepper, a stock cube, and whatever else you want to. Mix in the chicken and the leeks, and that’s your filling done.

For pastry, shop-bought pastry will do (best is Borgs), or I like to make a hot-water pastry. I have smallish ring pans with a press-up bottom, which take exactly one sheet of pastry for the base, with reasonably good grace. I paint the bottom with eggwhite to avoid soggy bottoms.

I’ll do something decorative on top, out of commercial shortcrust pastry, like heraldic beasts — I made up a set of plastic templates years ago. Add an egg wash for a lovely finish; once we added some Parisian essence (a brown food colouring) to the wash, and left the cutout white to really stand out.

Allergy variations: the pastry takes out the gluten-free people, unless you make special pastry which I won’t do myself but Alys does sometimes. If you have no-pork people, then you can’t give them lard pastry so buy a packet of Borgs. No dairy would require Borgs pastry and a special white sauce, and I wouldn’t go that far myself.

Authenticity: yes, lots of things like this, but more typically the sauce would have been thickened broth rather than a white sauce, though you do see them especially for invalids.