Name: Baking-powder Biscuit
Ingredients: 1 quart all-purpose flour; 3 teaspoons baking powder; 1 tablespoon salt; 1 tablespoon lard (melted or in small pieces); sweet milk (as needed)

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 ↓

Baking-powder Biscuit

Ingredients

1 quart all-purpose flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon lard (melted or in small pieces)
sweet milk (as needed)

Directions

Prepare the dough

Sift together the flour and baking powder.
Add the salt and lard, mixing well.
Wet the mixture with sweet milk until combined.

Shape and bake

Roll the dough to a thickness of ½ inch.
Cut with a biscuit cutter and bake for 5 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.

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.

Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together78,219 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

All-purpose flour: Forms the main structure of the biscuit as its proteins hydrate and set.
Baking powder: Releases gas when moistened and heated, lifting the dough so the biscuit rises.
Lard: Fat that coats flour particles and creates a tender, flaky texture.
Sweet milk: Hydrates the flour and binds the dough together.

“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.