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Dessert

New Year's Cookies

A simple cookie made with sour milk, lemon, mace, and baking soda, rolled, cut, and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 ↓

New Year's Cookies

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.

Make the dough

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the sour milk, baking soda, mace, lemon juice, and lemon rind.

  3. Mix in enough flour to form a dough.

Shape and bake

  1. Dust a surface with sugar and roll out the dough.

  2. Cut into desired shapes and bake at 400°F (200°C) for about 10 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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,346 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

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

What each ingredient does

Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda to produce gas, helping the cookies rise and turn tender.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour milk and lemon to produce carbon dioxide, which lightens the dough.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure so it can be rolled and cut.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma; the acid also helps activate the baking soda.

The step that matters

Mix in enough flour to form a dough. Adding too much flour makes the cookies dry and tough, while too little leaves the dough sticky and hard to roll and cut. Mixing only until combined keeps the texture tender.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, lemon, flour, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, lemon, flour, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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