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Dessert

Surprise Cookies

A raisin-filled cookie made with egg, sugar, lard, nutmeg, and sour milk.

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 ↓

Surprise Cookies

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix the egg, sugar, lard, salt, nutmeg, and extract.

  3. Dissolve the baking soda in the sour milk and add to the mixture.

  4. Gradually add flour until the dough is not too stiff.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, boil the chopped raisins, cold water, sugar, and flour until smooth and thick.

Fill and bake

  1. Spoon the filling onto the dough, fold, and 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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Nutmeg + raisintop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  3. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour 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
Provides the structure that holds the cookie together as it sets in the oven.
Egg
Binds the dough and adds richness and structure as it sets.
Lard
Adds fat that keeps the cookies tender and short.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in sour milk to release gas that lifts the dough.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cookies brown as they bake.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture in the filling.

The step that matters

Gradually add the flour. Add flour a little at a time and stop once the dough is workable. Extra flour makes the dough stiff, so the baked cookies turn dense and dry.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Jalapenofits less well
  4. Gingerfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, milk, flour, 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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