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Dessert

Crisp Chocolate Cookies

A simple cookie recipe with sugar, butter, egg, sour cream, baking soda, flour, and cocoa or chocolate.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Crisp Chocolate Cookies

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, cream together the sugar and butter.

  3. Add the egg and sour cream, mixing well.

  4. Stir in the baking soda and enough flour to form a soft dough.

  5. Add cocoa or chocolate according to your taste.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll the dough thin and cut into desired shapes.

  2. Bake in the preheated oven until crisp.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Butter + cocoatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together548 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-undecalactone (coconut, creamy).

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

Butter
Adds fat that creams with sugar, giving the cookies tenderness and richness.
Sugar
Sweetens the cookies and helps them brown and crisp as they bake.
Egg
Binds the dough and adds structure and richness.
Sour cream
Adds moisture and acidity, which reacts with the baking soda.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour cream's acidity to produce lift and a tender crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together after rolling and cutting.

The step that matters

Stir in the baking soda and flour to a soft dough. Baking soda needs acid from the sour cream to react properly, so it should be mixed in thoroughly and evenly. Too much flour makes the dough stiff and dry, producing tough cookies instead of a soft, crisp-edged texture.

Swap the cocoa

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, egg, cream, flour):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Macadamia nutfits better
  4. Cocoathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, cream, flour. 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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