Before McNuggets, McDonald's Tried Out Deep-Fried Chicken Pot Pie

Though McDonald's began as a burger restaurant, one of the chain's most classic menu items is the Chicken McNugget. Consisting of reconstituted boneless chicken meat (the old running joke is "Which part of the chicken is the nugget, anyway?"), the McNugget was created by McDonald's executive chef Rene Arend in 1979 at the suggestion of Chairman Fred Turner. Arend was trying to crack the code on a vegetarian option (specifically onion nuggets), but Turner suggested he give chicken a shot. By 1983, McNuggets went nationwide, and the rest is history.

Only ... the history is a little more complicated than that. It turns out McDonald's had been trying to get a chicken product working for a while, owing to an increase in environmental consciousness (red meat is less sustainable than chicken), rising beef prices, and 1977 governmental dietary goals that recommended people eat fewer cows. In fact, Chicken McNuggets weren't even the company's initial attempt at a chicken-focused menu item. But its first shot might surprise you: the company tried to manufacture a deep-fried chicken pot pie.

But how did this savory poultry pastry come about? And what happened to it? The legacy of this fabled fast food invention is more enduring than you might think.

The rapid increase in beef prices in 1972 was due to a knock-on effect from an unexpected source: the South American anchovy population dropped suddenly and precipitously. Since farmers used anchovies as a key component in cattle feed, farmers had to pay a lot more to keep their beef chowing down. This ultimately resulted in higher and higher beef prices as they sought to compensate. Fast food restaurants that had long relied on beef likewise turned to alternative product ideas in an attempt to diversify their menus and keep costs down.

But it was the 1977 release of governmental dietary restrictions that really spurred McDonald's to go full throttle with entering the poultry game. In response to the rise in heart disease among the American populace during the 1950s and '60s, the U.S. government basically begged people to eat more chicken and fish. In a sign of how different the times were, people actually listened. Enter McDonald's and their deep-fried chicken pot pie experiment.

Needless to say, since it's no longer around, the product failed to take off in testing. It's difficult to tell if it was from poor execution or simply the idea of deep frying a pot pie rather than baking one, but clearly, it didn't work — at the time, at least. Though a deep-fried chicken pot pie has never appeared on a McDonald's menu in America, Singapore actually debuted the product in 2018. However, it seems to have disappeared from the online menu.

The deep-fried pot pie also isn't the only time McDonald's has attempted a new product only to see it flop — although, at least in the case of the deep-fried pot pie, they learned it wasn't going to work before they'd pushed all their chips to the center of the table. Not so with the Arch Deluxe, which cost the company an amount somewhere in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The McDonald's pot pie experiment proves that when you fly too close to the fast food sun, you'll sometimes hit the culinary Icarus point. Thankfully for fans of easily-consumable deep-fried poultry chunks, at least with McNuggets, they eventually figured it out.