Name: Baking Powder Biscuits
Ingredients: 1 cup sweet skimmed milk or ½ cup new milk and ½ cup water; 2 teaspoons baking powder; 1 heaping tablespoon soft lard; ¼ teaspoon salt; 3 cups flour

Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Baking Powder Biscuits

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

1 cup sweet skimmed milk or ½ cup new milk and ½ cup water
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 heaping tablespoon soft lard
¼ teaspoon salt
3 cups flour

Directions

Mix the ingredients as you would for soda biscuits, handling the dough as little as possible.
Use only the best winter wheat flour.

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.

Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together78,219 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Delicate Cake246 recipes

Boiled Frosting69 recipes

Citron Cake68 recipes

Scotch Cake63 recipes

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Baking Powder Biscuits