Skip to main content
Dessert

Tea Biscuits

A simple biscuit made with flour, fat, baking powder, salt, and milk, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and milk 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 ↓

Tea Biscuits

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt.

  2. Cut in the fat using a knife or pastry cutter.

  3. Gradually add milk to form a soft dough, mixing as little as possible.

  4. Turn the dough onto a lightly floured surface and roll it to ½ inch thick.

Shape and bake

  1. Cut with a floured biscuit cutter and place on a greased or floured baking pan.

  2. Bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C) for 15 to 20 minutes.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk 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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the structure of the biscuits as its proteins and starches set during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, letting the biscuits rise and become light.
Fat
Coats flour particles when cut in, creating a tender, flaky texture.
Milk
Hydrates the flour to form the dough and adds moisture and browning.

The step that matters

Mixing the milk into the dough. Overworking the dough develops gluten, which makes biscuits tough and dense. Mixing only until the dough just comes together keeps them tender.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes