Skip to main content
Dessert

35 Potato Biscuit

A sweet biscuit made with butter, sugar, milk, mashed potatoes, yeast, eggs, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

35 Potato Biscuit

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix butter, sugar, milk, hot mashed potatoes, yeast, and eggs.

  2. Add enough flour to create a good batter and let it rise.

  3. Once risen, add more flour until it can be stirred in with a spoon.

Shape and bake

  1. Let it rise again, then roll out to ½ inch thick.

  2. Cut into small round cakes, place two together, and bake until light.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Milk + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + potatotop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

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

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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together as it rises and bakes.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the cakes set as they bake.
Butter
Adds fat, which tenderises the crumb and carries flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown during baking.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps form a soft, smooth dough.

The step that matters

Adding the second flour. Flour added once the dough has risen should be mixed in gradually. Too much at once stiffens the dough and limits the gas it can hold, which leads to a dense, heavy result.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, milk, egg, flour):

  1. Sweet potatofits about as well
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Arrowrootfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, milk, egg, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

More potato biscuit recipes

Sweet 5 See all 29 →

You might also like

Deep-Fried Potato BallsDeep-Fried Potato Balls119 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipes