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Dessert

Drop Biscuits

Drop biscuits are baked from a thick batter of sour milk, sugar, baking soda, salt, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Drop Biscuits

Why it works: Milk and flour 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 ↓

Drop 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.

Make the batter

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

  2. In a bowl, combine sour milk, sugar, baking soda, and salt.

  3. Stir in enough flour to create a thick batter.

  4. Pour the batter into pans.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake until golden brown.

  2. Break the biscuits apart instead of cutting them.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 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).

Milk and flour 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

Sour milk
Supplies moisture and acid that reacts with baking soda to help the biscuits rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk's acid to release gas that lifts the biscuits.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets as the batter bakes into a firm biscuit.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the biscuit tops brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour until just thick. Mixing too long develops gluten, which makes biscuits tough, while a thick batter holds its shape and rises well in the oven.

“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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