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Dessert

Tea Biscuit

A biscuit made from bread sponge, butter, lard, sugar, eggs, and flour, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Tea Biscuit

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 dough

  1. Mix the bread sponge with the butter and lard using a knife until well combined.

  2. Add the sugar and egg yolks.

  3. Mix in flour and the egg whites until the dough is stiff.

  4. Let the dough rise until 2 o'clock in the afternoon.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the dough into small biscuits.

  2. Bake the biscuits at 400°F (200°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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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

Bread sponge
Provides fermentation and lift so the dough rises before baking.
Butter and lard
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and carries flavour.
Egg yolks
Add richness and fat, helping the dough bind and brown.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the biscuits brown in the oven.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together and sets in baking.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise until 2 o'clock in the afternoon.. The rise depends on the live bread sponge fermenting. Too short a rise leaves the biscuits dense, while over-proofing can weaken the structure so they collapse or spread.

“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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