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Savoy Biscuits

Savoy biscuits are small sweet biscuits made with eggs, sugar, flour, and brushed with egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Savoy Biscuits

Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Savoy Biscuits

Oven, in the book's wordsA very moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Break the eggs into a bowl and add the granulated sugar. Beat until thick.

  2. Gradually beat in the dry sifted flour.

Shape and bake

  1. Place teaspoonfuls of the dough on buttered paper in a baking pan.

  2. Bake until light brown.

Finish

  1. When cold, brush the undersides of the biscuits with the beaten egg white and press two together.

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.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Eggs
Whipped into a thick foam that gives the batter its lift and airy structure.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps the beaten eggs hold a stable foam.
Dry sifted flour
Sets the batter into a dry, sturdy structure as the biscuits bake.

The step that matters

Beat the eggs and sugar until thick. The whipped egg foam is the only source of lift in these biscuits. If it is under-beaten, or deflated when the flour is added, the biscuits will bake flat and dense.

“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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