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Dessert

Soda Biscuit

A quick biscuit made with flour, butter, sugar, milk, and baking soda.

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

Soda Biscuit

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar.

  2. Gradually add the sifted flour and mix well.

  3. Dissolve the baking soda in the warm milk and add it to the mixture.

  4. Combine everything into a dough and turn it out onto a floured surface.

  5. Knead the dough gently, then roll it out to about ¼ inch thick.

Shape and bake

  1. Cut the dough into cakes and prick each one with a fork.

  2. Place the cakes on a baking sheet and bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 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).

Flour and butter 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
Forms the structure of the dough once combined with the liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness by coating the flour and creaming with sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the biscuit and helps it brown as it bakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the milk to produce gas that lightens the biscuit.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and helps bind the dough together.

The step that matters

Dissolving the baking soda in the warm milk. Baking soda must be fully dissolved so it reacts evenly throughout the dough. Unevenly distributed soda can leave bitter patches or pockets of uneven rise.

“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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