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Dessert

Sour Milk Cookies

Cookies made with butter, sour milk, sugar, baking soda, eggs, 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 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 ↓

Sour Milk Cookies

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the dough

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix the butter, sour milk, sugar, and eggs in the order given.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix the baking soda with 2 cups of flour.

  4. Combine the flour mixture with the wet ingredients, adding more flour until the dough is rollable.

Shape and bake

  1. Turn the dough onto a floured surface and roll it to about ¼ inch thick.

  2. Cut out cookies and place them on floured baking sheets, leaving an inch of space between each cookie.

  3. Bake in the hot oven and remove from the pan while hot to prevent breaking.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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
Adds fat and richness, giving the cookies tenderness and flavor.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda to help the cookies rise and brown.
Sugar
Sweetens the cookies and helps them brown during baking.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that leavens the dough.
Eggs
Add structure and binding, helping hold the cookies together as they set.

The step that matters

Remove the cookies from the pan while hot. Cookies are still soft and fragile when hot and firm up as they cool. Moving them too early can break them, so letting them cool slightly on the pan before lifting is the safer approach.

“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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