Name: Meat Biscuits {Parkes}
Ingredients: 1 pound flour; 1 pound meat; ¼ pound suet; ½ pound potatoes; a little sugar; onion; salt; pepper; spices

Why it works: Potato and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,023 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Meat Biscuits {Parkes}

Ingredients

Directions

Mix together flour, meat, suet, potatoes, sugar, onion, salt, pepper, and spices.
Cook the mixture and then bake it.

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.

Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,023 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,305 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together68,474 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Meat + potatotop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together786 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour: Provides the structure that holds the biscuits together as they set.
Meat: Forms the savory main body of the biscuits and firms up as it cooks.
Suet: Adds fat that makes the biscuits rich and tender.
Potatoes: Adds starch and moisture to the mixture, giving it body.
Onion: Contributes savory aroma and flavour as it cooks.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, meat, potato, sugar, pepper):

Capsicumfits better
Mustardfits better
Okrafits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, meat, potato, sugar, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.