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Dessert

Ginger Snaps

A sweet cookie made with butter, sugar, eggs, milk, ginger, baking powder, and flour.

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

Ginger Snaps

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Warm the butter and sugar, then stir to cream.

  2. Add the eggs, then the slightly warmed milk, followed by the ginger and baking powder.

  3. Incorporate most of the flour to form a dough.

  4. Press the dough together on a table with flat hands.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough as soft as possible, sift granulated sugar over it, and run a rolling pin over the top.

  2. Cut out shapes and bake carefully.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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. Ginger + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure to the cookies.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavour, and helps the sugar cream into the dough.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough to help the cookies rise and lighten.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough and cookie shapes together.
White sugar
Sweetens the cookies and helps them brown and crisp as they bake.

The step that matters

Roll out the dough as soft as possible. A softer dough bakes into a more tender cookie, but it is harder to handle. Adding flour to stiffen it makes cookies tougher and drier, so work gently and keep the dough cool.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Jalapenofits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, milk, 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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