Skip to main content
Main

Meat-hiscuit

A biscuit made from boiled beef broth and wheaten flour, baked and then boiled again.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beef and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Meat-hiscuit

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Evaporate the broth from boiled beef until it reaches a syrup consistency.

  2. Mix the syrup with enough wheaten flour to form a solid paste.

  3. Roll out the paste with a rolling pin and pierce it with holes.

Shape and bake

  1. Cut the paste into sea biscuit dimensions.

  2. Bake and dry the biscuits until fully hardened.

Serve

  1. To serve, break the biscuit and boil it in 20-30 times its weight in water for 25-30 minutes.

  2. Season with salt or other seasonings as desired.

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. Beef + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Beef and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 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

Boiled beef
Supplies the concentrated broth that gives the paste its meaty flavour and binds it.
Wheaten flour
Forms the structure of the paste, which hardens into a dry, sturdy biscuit when baked.

The step that matters

Evaporating the broth to a syrup. The broth must reach a thick syrup so the flour can form a firm, workable paste. Thin broth makes a soft dough that will not hold its shape or dry out properly in the oven.

“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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes