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Bread

Cookies

Cookies made with flour, butter, sugar, eggs, sour cream, baking soda, caraway seeds, and nutmeg or ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Caraway and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 200 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Cookies

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Rub the butter into the flour until well combined.

  2. Add the sugar, eggs, sour cream, baking soda, and caraway seeds. Mix until a dough forms.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough thinly and cut into round cakes.

  2. Bake until golden brown.

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. Caraway + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together200 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Flour + carawaytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Rubbed into the flour to coat it, giving the cookies a tender, crumbly texture.
Flour
Forms the structure of the dough once combined with the liquid ingredients.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cookies brown during baking.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure as they set in the oven.
Sour cream
Adds moisture and acidity, which tenderizes the dough.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour cream's acidity to produce gas that helps the cookies rise and brown.

The step that matters

Rolling the dough thinly. Thin dough bakes through and browns evenly, while thick dough stays doughy in the center and can spread unevenly. Rolling it to an even thickness helps the cookies bake uniformly.

Swap the caraway

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Carawaythe original
  4. Allspicefits about as well

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