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Dessert

Cheese Biscuits

Cheese biscuits are soft dough biscuits made with cream cheese, butter, eggs, cayenne pepper, salt, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream cheese and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,747 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Cheese Biscuits

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. Grate the cream cheese.

  2. In a bowl, combine the grated cheese, beaten eggs, cayenne pepper, salt, and butter. Mix lightly with enough flour to form a soft dough.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll the dough thin.

  2. Cut the dough into shapes.

  3. Bake in a moderate oven (350°F / 175°C) until delicately brown.

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. Cream cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,747 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Cream cheese
Adds richness and a tender, moist crumb with a soft cheesy flavour.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and richness to the biscuits.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavour, and helps the biscuits brown.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the soft dough together after baking.

The step that matters

Mixing in the flour. Mixing lightly keeps the dough tender. Overworking flour develops gluten, which makes biscuits tough and dense rather than soft.

“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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