Skip to main content
Dessert

Cinnamon Drops

A drop cookie made with flour, butter, sugar, eggs, cinnamon, and topped with pistachio kernels.

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

Why it works: Cinnamon and pistachio match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 201 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Cinnamon Drops

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 batter

  1. Cream the butter in a bowl until smooth.

  2. Add the sugar, flour, cinnamon, and the yolks of the eggs.

  3. Whisk the egg whites until stiff and fold them into the mixture gently.

Shape and bake

  1. Use a piping bag or biscuit forcer to drop the mixture onto a buttered baking sheet.

  2. Sprinkle finely shredded pistachio kernels on top.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) until lightly colored.

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. Cinnamon + pistachiotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together201 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Flour + pistachiotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together505 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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
Provides the structure that holds the cookies together as they bake.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness, and helps the cookies brown.
Sugar
Sweetens the cookies and contributes to browning at the surface.
Eggs
Yolks add richness and binding; whipped whites lighten the batter and help it rise.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Whisked whites trap air that gives lift. Folding gently keeps that air in; stirring vigorously deflates the batter and yields flatter, denser cookies.

Swap the pistachio

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Pistachiothe original
  4. Hazelnutfits about as well

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

You might also like

Cinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipesPistachio Ice CreamPistachio Ice Cream36 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes