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Dessert

Meat Biscuits

A biscuit made with flour, meat, suet, potatoes, sugar, onion, salt, pepper, and spices, baked until done.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix together flour, meat, suet, potatoes, sugar, onion, salt, pepper, and spices.

  2. Cook the mixture.

  3. Bake it until done.

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. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Meat + potatotop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together786 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. 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
Forms the dough structure that holds the biscuits together as they set.
Meat
Makes up the main filling and firms up as its proteins set during cooking.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the biscuits and keeps them moist and tender.
Potatoes
Their starch adds body and moisture to the mixture.

The step that matters

Bake it until done. No time is given, so the cook must judge doneness. The meat needs to be cooked through, and the biscuits need to set firmly rather than stay soft in the centre.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. 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.

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