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Dessert

Raised Biscuits

A yeast-leavened biscuit made with milk, lard or butter, sugar, salt, and flour, baked after rising.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Raised Biscuits

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. Warm the milk slightly and melt the lard or butter.

  2. Mix all ingredients together overnight.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough to a thickness of ½ inch and cut into round cakes.

  2. Place the cakes closely together in a pan and let them rise for 1 hour.

  3. Bake for 20 minutes at 400°F (200°C).

Sponge and rise

  1. Create a thin sponge with half the flour and let it rise for 5 hours before mixing in the rest of the flour.

  2. Let rise for another 5 hours and then proceed as directed.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 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).

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

Flour
Its gluten forms the structure that holds the risen biscuits together.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps make the dough soft and pliable.
Lard or butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and gives a rich texture.
Yeast
Produces gas during fermentation, which makes the dough rise.
White sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds mild sweetness and browning at the surface.

The step that matters

Letting the sponge rise. Yeast needs time and warmth to ferment the sponge. Rising too short leaves the dough dense, while rising too long exhausts the yeast and the dough can collapse or turn sour.

“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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