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Dessert

Lemon Crackers

A lemon-flavored biscuit made with flour, butter, sugar, eggs, and lemon zest and juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter 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 Crackers

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Rub the butter thoroughly into the flour.

  2. Mix in the powdered sugar and finely chopped lemon peel.

  3. Beat the eggs well and add them to the mixture along with the lemon juice.

  4. Stir thoroughly to form a stiff paste.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll the dough to 1 inch thick and cut into biscuits with a cutter.

  2. Bake on tins 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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the biscuits together as they bake.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add moisture and richness to the biscuits.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the biscuits tender and rich in flavour.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the dough and dissolves smoothly into the mixture.
Lemons
Peel adds aroma and juice adds acidity that brightens the flavour.

The step that matters

Stir thoroughly to form a stiff paste. Once flour meets liquid, extra stirring develops gluten, which can make the biscuits tough rather than crisp and tender. Stir until the dough just comes together and is evenly combined.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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