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Dessert

SuGAR CookIiEes

A sweet baked cookie made with butter, sugar, sour milk, baking soda, and flour.

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

SuGAR CookIiEes

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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

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

  3. Add the sour milk and baking soda, mixing well.

  4. Gradually add flour until the dough is easy to roll out.

Shape and bake

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

  2. Dust the cookies with sugar before baking.

  3. Bake in the preheated oven until lightly golden.

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. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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
Creams with sugar to add tenderness and richness to the cookies.
Sugar
Sweetens the cookies and, creamed with butter, helps give a tender crumb.
Sour milk
Adds acidity that reacts with the baking soda to help the cookies rise and soften.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour milk to produce gas for rising and encourages browning.

The step that matters

Adding flour gradually. Adding flour gradually lets you stop once the dough is easy to roll out. Too much flour makes the cookies dry and tough, because flour proteins and starch absorb liquid and build structure.

“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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