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Wheat Flour Crackers

A simple wheat flour cracker made with butter or lard, baking soda, salt, and sweet milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Wheat Flour Crackers

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.

Prepare the dough

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

  2. In a bowl, rub the butter into the flour and salt until well combined.

  3. Dissolve the baking soda in enough sweet milk to form a stiff dough.

Shape the crackers

  1. Knead the dough well for better crackers.

  2. Roll out the dough to about ½ inch thick.

  3. Cut into desired shapes.

Bake

  1. Bake quickly until golden.

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. Flour + buttertop 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).

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

Flour
Forms the main structure of the dough once mixed with liquid and kneaded.
Butter or lard
Fat coats the flour particles, tenderizing the crackers and making them short and crisp.
Baking soda
Reacts with the dough's acidity to lighten it and encourage browning in the oven.
Sweet milk
Hydrates the flour so the mixture binds into a dough that can be rolled.

The step that matters

Knead the dough well. Kneading develops gluten, giving the dough elasticity so it can be rolled thin without tearing and holds its shape in the oven. Under-kneaded dough tends to crumble and crack.

“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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