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Dessert

Picnic Cookies

A sweet cookie made with butter, sugar, eggs, baking soda, nutmeg, cloves, and flour, topped with raisins or currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Picnic 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 and sugar.

  3. Add the beaten eggs and mix well.

  4. Dissolve the baking soda in a small amount of boiling water and add to the mixture.

  5. Stir in the nutmeg and cloves.

  6. Gradually add flour until a soft dough forms, just stiff enough to roll out.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough and cut into round cakes.

  2. Place a raisin or currant on top of each cookie.

  3. Bake in the preheated oven until golden brown.

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. Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Clove + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,671 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

Butter
Creamed with sugar, it adds richness and a tender texture to the cookies.
Eggs
Beaten eggs bind the dough and add structure and moisture.
Baking soda
Dissolved in boiling water, it reacts to lift the dough and help it spread and brown.
Flour
Forms the structure of the dough, which is kept soft yet firm enough to roll out.

The step that matters

Gradually add flour until a soft dough forms. Adding too much flour makes the dough stiff and dry, producing tough cookies, while too little leaves it too soft to roll and cut cleanly.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, nutmeg, 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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