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Dessert

Cinnamon Drops

Cinnamon Drops are drop cookies 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
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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 firm and fold them into the mixture gently.

Shape and bake

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

  2. Sprinkle finely shredded pistachio kernels on top.

  3. Bake 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

Butter
Adds richness and tenderness, and helps the cookies hold a soft, smooth texture.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cookies together as they bake.
Eggs
Egg yolks add richness and binding, while whipped whites add lift and a lighter crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cookies brown during baking.
Ground cinnamon
Provides the main warm, aromatic flavor of the cookies.

The step that matters

Folding in the whipped egg whites. Whites must be whipped until firm, then folded in gently. Overmixing knocks out the air, so the cookies spread flat and bake up denser instead of light.

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.

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