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Tea Biscuit

A simple biscuit dough made with flour, baking powder, butter or lard, sugar, salt, and milk, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Tea Biscuit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. In a large bowl, mix the baking powder, sugar, and salt with the flour.

  2. Rub in the butter or lard, or melt it and mix with the flour and milk.

  3. Knead to form a smooth dough and dust flour on the table.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough to about ½ inch thick and let it rest for a minute.

  2. Cut out biscuits and place them in rows on a baking pan.

  3. Brush with a thin egg wash and bake at 350°F (175°C) 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure that holds the biscuits together as they bake.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough, helping the biscuits rise and become light.
Butter or lard
Fat coats the flour particles, tenderizing the crumb and adding richness.
Sugar
Adds mild sweetness and helps the surface brown in the oven.
Milk
Hydrates the flour so the dough comes together and stays moist after baking.

The step that matters

Knead only until the dough is smooth. Extra handling develops gluten strands in the flour, which makes the dough tough and the biscuits dense instead of tender.

“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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