Skip to main content
Dessert

Fruit Cookies

A sweet baked cookie with raisins, currants, walnuts, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Fruit Cookies

Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 ↓

Fruit Cookies

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

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

Prepare

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

  2. Dissolve the baking soda in the milk.

Make and bake the cookies

  1. In a large bowl, cream together the sugar and butter.

  2. Add the eggs, raisins, currants, walnuts, flour, spices, and the dissolved baking soda mixture.

  3. Drop by teaspoons onto buttered baking sheets.

  4. 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Walnut + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Raisin + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,070 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  4. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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 to create a tender, structured dough with fat for richness.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and moisture to the cookies.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cookies together as they bake.
Baking soda
Reacts with the dough to help the cookies rise and encourages browning.
Sugar
Sweetens the cookies and, creamed with butter, helps give them a tender texture.

The step that matters

Drop by teaspoons onto buttered baking sheets. Dough portion size and spacing control how cookies spread and bake. Uneven or oversized drops can bake unevenly, so keep portions similar and leave room between them.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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

More fruit cookies recipes

Chocolate 5Cocoa 4 See all 68 →

You might also like

Cinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesRed Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesClove CakeClove Cake53 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipes