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Dessert

Excellent Biscuit

A quick, fluffy biscuit made with flour, baking powder, butter, salt, baking soda, sour cream, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Excellent Biscuit

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Sift the flour and baking powder together in a large bowl.

  3. Add the softened butter and salt, mixing until crumbly.

Make the dough

  1. In a separate bowl, stir the baking soda into the sour cream.

  2. Combine the sour cream mixture with the flour mixture and stir until just mixed.

  3. Drop spoonfuls of the dough onto a baking sheet.

Bake

  1. Bake in the preheated oven until golden brown, about 15-20 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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Flour and butter 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

All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure as gluten forms when the dough is mixed.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven, helping the biscuits rise and become light.
Unsalted butter
Stays in pieces in the dough, creating flaky layers and tenderness as it melts.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour cream to produce gas, adding lift and browning.
Sour cream
Adds moisture and fat for tenderness, and its acidity activates the baking soda.

The step that matters

Stir until just mixed. Overmixing the dough after the liquid is added develops too much gluten, which makes biscuits tough instead of 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.

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