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Dessert

Flain Dessert or Wine Biscuits

A biscuit made with butter, flour, and milk, baked until crisp.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Flain Dessert or Wine Biscuits

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix 2 ounces of fresh butter with 1 pound of flour until crumbly.

  2. Add enough new milk to form a stiff paste.

Shape the biscuits

  1. Roll out the dough to ½ inch thick and cut biscuits with a round cutter.

  2. Stack the biscuits on top of each other until all are cut.

  3. Roll them out very thin, prick with a fork, and place pricked side down on lightly floured baking sheets.

Bake

  1. Bake in a moderate oven (350°F / 175°C) for a few minutes until crisp and slightly browned.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Flour
Forms the main structure of the dough when moistened.
Butter
Fat that rubs into the flour and keeps the biscuits short and tender.
New milk
Moistens the flour so the dough binds into a stiff paste.

The step that matters

Roll them out very thin and prick them with a fork. Thin dough bakes dry and crisp rather than soft. Pricking lets steam escape so the biscuits lie flat instead of puffing and blistering in the oven.

“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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