Patrick Macnee’s “Steed’s Very English Parsley Pie”

by Jenny
20 September, 2026
Cooking The Detectives, Patrick Macnee
No Comments

I made this over two years ago, and it is only now hitting the blog.

It’s been hanging around in the drafts because I couldn’t find the photos I took at the time. There’s a big lesson here: write these recipes up soon after making them! I found the photos in the end by searching for parsley, and this one popped up so I could then find the others.

There is a LOT of parsley in Patrick’s pie!

And here is my report…

Well, I never — this was good! I am getting close to completing test cooking for the Cooking the Detectives book, and this one has been on the list for a long time because I am featuring The Avengers.

Diana Rigg’s goulash recipe has secured itself a spot already, and Patrick’s pie will now be joining it.

NOTE – Cooking the Detectives was published in 2025! Available on Amazon or to order from your local bookstore — signed copies available from my Etsy shop.

The pie is basically a chicken pie

With one HELLOVA lot of parsley in it!

This recipe has furnished me with my favourite cataloguing typo of all time. When Patrick provided the recipe to a Toronto newspaper, he told the journalist, “There’s lots more chicken in it than parsley.” Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, chicken became children…HAHA!

The scan above is the clearest I can get it. If it’s difficult to read, it’s ½ cup of whipping cream added at the end. Although these days we don’t need to scald the cream, I would suggest heating it up nevertheless so that when you pour it through the “chimney hole” in the pastry, it doesn’t cool the chicken.

I used 150 g of parsley (before de-stemming) and it seemed about right, my chicken was a small one. Although Mr R was worried it wouldn’t all fit into my pie dish with such a large amount of parsley it did!

He was also concerned that with such a large amount of parsley the flavour might have overpowered the chicken, but no!

Mr R made a little bowler hat for the top of our pie.

I accidentally knocked the temperature dial on my oven so burned the pastry

But the pie was still really good, the chicken was super succulent.

We could have been more liberal with the salt & pepper, nutmeg and garlic. We bumped the garlic up to 2 cloves and I think we could have used 3 or 4.

My top tip for this one would be… Do not be concerned about the small amount of stock. I was a little worried about this, but my work colleague James had tested this recipe for me during lockdown (that’s how long it’s been on the to-test list!). He added a lot of extra stock and found that it bubbled out of the pie. So I tried it exactly to Patrick’s recipe and something magical happened. I guess that all that parsley keeps the chicken moist as it cooks. DELICIOUS!

Thanks, good old Steed!