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Dessert

Butter Drops

Butter Drops are small pastries made with butter, flour, rose water, eggs, nutmeg, pearlash, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Butter Drops

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 the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, cream the butter until soft.

Make and bake the batter

  1. Add the flour, rose water, beaten eggs, and nutmeg, and mix well.

  2. Dissolve the pearlash in a little milk and stir it into the mixture just before baking.

  3. Drop spoonfuls of the batter onto baking tins.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Rose + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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 the sugar-free base to give richness and a tender, short crumb.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the drops together as they bake.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as they set in the oven.
Pearlash (potassium carbonate)
Acts as a leavening agent, releasing gas that helps the drops rise and lighten.

The step that matters

Stirring in the pearlash. Pearlash reacts and releases gas as soon as it meets the batter, so it should be dissolved in milk and stirred in just before baking. Waiting lets the gas escape and the drops spread flat and dense instead of rising.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, rose, egg, milk):

  1. Nutmegthe original
  2. Cinnamonfits about as well
  3. Parsleyfits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, rose, egg, milk. 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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