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Dessert

Soda Biscuit

A quick oven-baked biscuit made with sweet milk, cream of tartar, baking soda, lard, salt, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Soda Biscuit

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

Make and shape the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix the sweet milk with the cream of tartar and baking soda.

  2. In another bowl, combine the lard with the flour and a little salt.

  3. Add the milk mixture to the flour mixture and stir until combined.

  4. Roll out the dough to a thickness of ¼ inch.

  5. Cut into desired shapes and place on a baking sheet.

Bake

  1. Bake for 10 minutes or until golden.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sweet milk
Provides the liquid that moistens the flour and hydrates the dough.
Cream of tartar
Adds acidity that reacts with the baking soda to produce rising gas.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the milk mixture to lighten the biscuit as it bakes.
Lard
Fat that coats flour particles, tenderizing the biscuit and adding flakiness.

The step that matters

Add the milk mixture to the flour mixture and stir until combined. Stir only until the dough just comes together. Overmixing develops gluten, which makes biscuits tough rather than tender, and the leavening reaction starts as soon as the wet and dry ingredients meet, so it should not sit long.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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