Skip to main content
Main

Tea Biscuits

A biscuit made with flour, milk, lard, baking powder, salt, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Tea Biscuits

Ingredients

Directions

Mix and rest

  1. Mix all ingredients thoroughly.

  2. Let the mixture stand for 15 minutes.

Cut and bake

  1. Cut out biscuits using a biscuit cutter.

  2. Let the cut biscuits stand for another 15 minutes.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 500°F (260°C) for 20 minutes.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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 main structure as its proteins form gluten when mixed with liquid.
Lard
Fat that coats flour particles and keeps the biscuits tender and flaky.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, helping the biscuits rise.
Milk
Supplies moisture that hydrates the flour and binds the dough together.

The step that matters

Bake in a preheated oven. A hot, fully preheated oven makes the baking powder release gas quickly and sets the outside of the biscuit, helping it rise and hold its shape. Placing the biscuits in a cooler oven can cause them to spread and bake dense.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes