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Baking

Coddenham Biscuits

A simple biscuit made with butter, flour, and salt, rolled thin and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Coddenham Biscuits

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Rub the butter into the flour.

  2. Add a little salt and beat the mixture very hard with a rolling pin for 30 minutes.

Shape and bake

  1. Take off a portion of dough for each biscuit and roll them as thin as possible.

  2. Prick the rolled dough with a fork.

  3. Preheat the baking tins until very hot.

  4. Half-bake the biscuits before placing them in the oven.

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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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

Butter
Rubbed into the flour, it adds richness and tenderness to the biscuits.
Flour
Forms the structure of the dough once mixed and worked.

The step that matters

Beat the dough for 30 minutes. Long, hard beating works air and gluten into the dough, which affects texture. Overworking can make biscuits tough, so the beating should be done with care and attention to how the dough responds.

“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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