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Dessert

Dixie Biscuit

A soft biscuit made with sweet milk, lard, butter, sugar, salt, yeast, egg, and flour, baked after rising.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Dixie Biscuit

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Heat the sweet milk with butter, lard, sugar, and egg in a double boiler until scalded.

  2. Let the mixture cool.

  3. Dissolve the yeast in a little cold milk or water.

  4. Stir the dissolved yeast into the warm milk mixture.

  5. Add 2½ cups of flour to the warm milk to form a stiff batter.

  6. Let the batter rise.

  7. Incorporate the remaining flour to form a sponge.

  8. Let the sponge rise again.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough.

  2. Cut into biscuit shapes.

  3. Grease the tops with butter.

  4. Let the biscuits rise once more.

  5. Bake the biscuits.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Flour
Forms the batter and sponge that give the biscuits their structure.
Yeast
Produces gas during rising, leavening the dough so it becomes light.
Milk
Provides moisture and liquid that hydrates the flour and dissolves the yeast.
Egg
Adds richness and helps bind the dough.
Butter
Adds fat for flavor and tenderness, and browns the biscuit tops.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds a little sweetness and browning.

The step that matters

Let the batter rise. Yeast needs time and warmth to produce gas; rising too short leaves the biscuits dense, while the mixture must be cooled first so the heat does not kill the yeast.

“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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