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Dessert

Eggless Cookies

Eggless Cookies are sweet baked treats made with flour, shortening, sugar, sour milk, baking soda, and optional flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Eggless Cookies

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix flour, shortening, and salt as you would for pie dough.

  2. Add sugar, sour milk, and baking soda.

  3. Incorporate flavoring if desired.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the dough.

  2. Bake until 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Forms the main structure of the cookie as its proteins set during baking.
Shortening
Adds fat that tenderizes the dough and gives a crumbly, short texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the cookies and helps them brown and crisp at the edges.
Sour milk
Provides moisture and acidity that reacts with the baking soda.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that makes the cookies rise.

The step that matters

Mix flour, shortening, and salt as you would for pie dough.. Rubbing the fat into the flour until it is evenly distributed coats the flour particles and limits gluten development, which keeps the cookies tender rather than tough.

“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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