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Dessert

Susan’s Wheaten Biscuits

A quick baked biscuit made with wheaten meal, flour, butter, buttermilk, baking powder, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and buttermilk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,721 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Susan’s Wheaten Biscuits

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Rub the butter into the flour.

  3. Add the wheaten meal, baking powder, salt, and enough buttermilk to form a dough.

  4. Roll out the dough and cut it with a small round cutter.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in the preheated oven until golden brown.

  2. Serve hot.

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. Flour + buttermilktop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Buttermilk + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,674 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Wheaten meal
Provides the coarse, wholesome body and nutty flavour that defines the biscuit.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the dough once bound with buttermilk.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven, lifting the biscuits so they rise and turn light.
Buttermilk
Moistens the dry ingredients to bind the dough and adds slight acidity for tenderness.
Butter
Rubbed into the flour to add fat, which tenderises the crumb and gives richness.

The step that matters

Rub the butter into the flour. If the butter is not rubbed in finely, it leaves greasy pockets instead of coating the flour particles. Evenly distributed fat keeps the biscuits short and tender rather than tough.

“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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