Who made Singapore's first chicken pie?

Who invented the Singapore chicken pie?

Nobody can name one inventor of the Singapore chicken pie, and anyone who tells you otherwise should show their evidence. The chicken pie arrived in Singapore as part of British baking and was reshaped over decades by local cooks, especially Hainanese cooks, and by neighbourhood bakeries. It is a dish with many hands behind it, not a single author, and it has drifted a long way from its British parent; Pie Singapore sets out how Singapore pies differ from British and Aussie ones.

We include this page on a site about “the original Don” because we want to be precise about our own claim. Chef Don Lim’s chicken pie recipe dates, by his account, from 1983. That makes it the original of his pie. It does not make it the first chicken pie in Singapore, and we never say it does.

What is documented about early chicken pies in Singapore?

What is documented is mostly about bakeries that still trade. Two examples, both from published sources:

• Polar Puffs & Cakes says on its own website that it started in 1926, and it sells chicken pies today. We have not seen when its chicken pie first went on sale, so we note only the founding year the brand gives.
• Balmoral Bakery in Clementi is listed by Honeycombers as an old-school bakery from 1965 that sells chicken and beef pies. There is a fuller picture in Pie Singapore’s profile of Balmoral Bakery.

Both are older than our recipe. We mention them with respect, because a fair history of the Singapore chicken pie includes them.

What is commonly told but harder to document?

What is commonly told is the Hainanese story. Many Hainanese immigrants are said to have worked as cooks in British households, ships, hotels and clubs, learning Western dishes such as pies and stews, and later cooking them in coffee shops and bakeries for local customers. That history is widely repeated and we believe it to be broadly right, but it is a story of a community over generations, not a single moment you can date.

The local chicken pie that came out of it has a recognisable shape: chunky chicken, potato and vegetables, a thick creamy gravy, often half a hard-boiled egg, under a golden crust. Our own pie belongs to that family. See The Hainanese thread.

Where does Chef Don’s 1983 recipe fit?

Chef Don’s recipe fits in the middle of that history, not at the start. He created it in 1983, by his own account, baking for the Hewlett-Packard staff cafeteria. He took it to his own shop at Far East Square in 2000, where it became widely known as the Don pie. He has baked it ever since, apart from the years after he sold the Don Pie brand, and today it is DonChef’s Original Chicken Pie, baked at Tyrwhitt Road. The neighbourhood bakery side of this history is told in our note on old-school chicken pie culture in Singapore.

So when our menu says “Singapore’s original Chicken Pie, since 1983”, read it as “the original Don chicken pie, Chef Don’s own recipe, since 1983”. The full explanation is in What “since 1983” means, and the three tests we hold ourselves to are on what “original” means for the Don pie.

Documented versus claimed: a summary

Why we would rather say “we don’t know”

We would rather say “we don’t know” because a heritage claim that cannot survive a question is not worth making. If we told you Chef Don invented the Singapore chicken pie, you would be right to doubt everything else on this site. By saying plainly what is documented and what is not, we hope you will trust the parts we can prove: that this is Chef Don’s recipe, made in DonChef’s kitchen, and sold only by us.

If you have documented evidence about early chicken pies in Singapore, a dated menu, a photograph, a newspaper clipping, we would genuinely like to see it. Old pie history deserves a better record than it has.