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Dessert

Lemon Cookies

A sweet biscuit made with sugar, butter, eggs, lemon juice and rind, baking soda, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Cookies

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Cream together the sugar and butter.

  2. Add the eggs, lemon juice, and grated lemon rind; mix well.

  3. Dissolve the baking soda in the lemon juice and add to the mixture.

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

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough, cut into shapes, and bake.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Sugar
Sweetens the dough and, creamed with butter, helps give a tender crumb.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and tenderness, and carries flavor through the dough.
Eggs
Add structure and moisture, binding the dough together.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the cookies their structure.
Baking soda
Reacts with the lemon's acid to release gas, helping the cookies rise and brown.
Lemon juice and rind
Add acidity and bright citrus aroma, and activate the baking soda.

The step that matters

Adding the flour. Flour should be added gradually and stopped once the dough is soft but not too stiff. Too much flour dries the dough and makes the cookies tough and dense, while mixing flour in fully develops gluten, which also toughens the texture.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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