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Dessert

Devilled Biscuits

Baked biscuits topped with cheese and mustard paste, seasoned with salt, pepper, cayenne, and optional anchovy or chutney.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Biscuit and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 121 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Devilled Biscuits

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Butter both sides of the biscuits.

  2. Sprinkle the biscuits with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

Top the biscuits

  1. Make a paste with cheese and a little mustard.

  2. Cover one side of each biscuit with the cheese paste.

  3. Dust with cayenne pepper.

Broil and serve

  1. Broil the biscuits until hot.

  2. Serve immediately.

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. Biscuit + mustardtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together121 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Cheese + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,805 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Biscuit + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together841 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cheese
Melts into the paste, giving the topping richness and savoury flavour when broiled.
Butter
Adds fat that carries flavour and helps the biscuits brown lightly under heat.
Made mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that balances the richness of the cheese.

The step that matters

Broil the biscuits until hot. Broiling is fast and intense, so the cheese can scorch before it softens. Watch closely and remove them once the topping is melted and hot through.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (biscuit, butter, pepper, cheese, anchovy):

  1. Mustardthe original
  2. Spinachfits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Potatofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against biscuit, butter, pepper, cheese, anchovy. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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