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Dessert

Sugar Cookies

A sweet cookie made with eggs, sugar, butter, baking soda, cream of tartar, flour, and sprinkled with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Sugar Cookies

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, cream together the butter and sugar.

  3. Add the eggs, baking soda, and cream of tartar; mix well.

  4. Gradually add flour until the dough is soft.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough and sprinkle with granulated sugar.

  2. Roll over once with a rolling pin, then cut into cookies.

  3. Place on a baking sheet and 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.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  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. 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
Creams with the sugar to trap air and give the cookies a tender, rich texture.
Eggs
Add structure and moisture, binding the dough together.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the dough to produce gas, helping the cookies rise and spread.
Cream of tartar
Adds acidity that activates the baking soda and helps keep the texture tender.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the dough into a cuttable shape as it bakes.

The step that matters

Gradually add flour until the dough is soft. Adding too much flour at once or overworking the dough makes cookies dry and tough, because gluten develops with mixing and extra flour absorbs moisture. Stopping when the dough is soft keeps the cookies tender.

“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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