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Dessert

Cheese Biscuit

A quick cheese biscuit made with grated cheese, flour, shortening, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cheese and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,426 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cheese Biscuit

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Sift together baking powder, salt, and flour.

  2. Add shortening and cheese.

  3. Slowly mix in enough milk to hold the dough together.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll the dough on a floured surface to ½ inch thick.

  2. Cut with a small biscuit cutter and bake for 15 minutes at 400°F (200°C).

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. Cheese + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Cheese + flourtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,860 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the biscuit's shape as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, making the biscuits rise and become light.
Shortening
Coats flour particles so the biscuits stay tender and flaky rather than tough.
Cheese
Adds fat and savory flavor, and its fat also tenderizes the crumb.
Milk
Hydrates the flour so the dough binds together and bakes up moist.

The step that matters

Slowly mix in the milk. Adding milk gradually and stopping once the dough just holds together prevents overmixing. Overworked flour develops gluten, which makes biscuits dense and tough 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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