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Dessert

Honey Cookies

Honey Cookies are sweet biscuits made with honey, sugar, flour, eggs, lemon juice, almonds, cinnamon, and citron peels.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,514 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Honey Cookies

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Boil honey and granulated sugar together, then cool.

  2. Add 2½ lbs of flour to the cooled mixture.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix 1 lb sugar, baking soda, eggs dissolved in hot water, and lemon juice.

  4. Add 1 lb flour, chopped almonds, cinnamon, and mixed citron and peels to the second mixture.

  5. Combine both doughs well.

Shape

  1. Roll out and cut with a cookie cutter.

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. Almond + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,514 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Honey + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,446 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

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

What each ingredient does

Honey
Adds sweetness and moisture, and keeps the cookies soft.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and richness.
Baking soda
Reacts with acidic lemon juice to lighten the dough and help it rise.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together.
Almonds
Add texture and a nutty flavor.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against honey, sugar, flour, egg, almond, 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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