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Dessert

Filled Cookies

A sweet cookie dough filled with raisins, nuts, and a thickened raisin mixture, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Filled Cookies

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 the dough

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

  2. In a bowl, cream together the butter, lard, and sugar.

  3. Dissolve the baking soda in the sweet milk and add the dissolved baking soda mixture to the butter mixture.

  4. In another bowl, combine the flour, cream of tartar, vanilla, and salt.

  5. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, mixing well.

  6. Roll the dough very thin and cut into shapes.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, combine the chopped raisins, nuts, sugar, water, and flour in a saucepan.

  2. Cook the filling until thick.

  3. Add lemon juice to the filling to taste.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place 1 teaspoon of filling on each cookie.

  2. Top each filled cookie with another cookie.

  3. Bake in the preheated oven 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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  5. Vanilla + nutstop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together638 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure that holds the dough together as it bakes.
Butter and lard
Adds fat for tenderness and a rich, short texture in the dough.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the dough to help it rise and brown.
Cream of tartar
Acidic ingredient that reacts with the baking soda and helps leavening.
Sugar
Sweetens the cookies and helps them brown as they bake.

The step that matters

Roll the dough very thin. Thin dough bakes through and crisps evenly, while thick dough stays cakey and can hide the filling and bake unevenly around it.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, milk, flour, cream, vanilla, raisin):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, milk, flour, cream, vanilla, raisin. 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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