Name: Lunch Biscuits
Ingredients: 1½ pounds all-purpose flour; ½ pound unsalted butter; ¾ pound granulated sugar; 1 teaspoon baking soda; Milk (as needed to form a dough)

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 ↓

Lunch Biscuits

Ingredients

1½ pounds all-purpose flour
½ pound unsalted butter
¾ pound granulated sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
Milk (as needed to form a dough)

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.

Prepare

Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

Make the dough

In a bowl, beat the butter and sugar together until thoroughly mixed.
Add the flour and enough milk to form a dough.

Shape and bake

Roll the dough into sheets and cut into cakes.
Bake in the preheated oven 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.

Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together78,219 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
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

All-purpose flour: Provides the main structure that holds the biscuits together as they bake.
Unsalted butter: Adds fat for tenderness and richness, and helps the butter and sugar cream together.
Granulated sugar: Adds sweetness and helps browning as the biscuits turn golden in the oven.
Baking soda: Reacts with acid in the dough to produce gas, helping the biscuits rise and 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.