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Dessert

New Year's Cookies

A buttery cookie dough flavored with caraway seeds, mace, and sour milk, rolled, sugared, and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Caraway and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,435 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

New Year's 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.

Make the dough

  1. Cream together the butter and sugar until smooth.

  2. Add the eggs, sour milk, baking soda, caraway seeds, and mace.

  3. Mix in enough flour to form a stiff dough.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll the dough thin and cut into rounds.

  2. Roll the cookies in fine sugar instead of flour.

  3. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for about 15 minutes.

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. Caraway + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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 richness and tenderness, and helps the cookies brown as they bake.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps it brown and crisp in the oven.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and richness to the cookies.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda so the cookies rise and stay tender.
Baking soda (saleratus)
Reacts with the sour milk to produce gas, helping the cookies rise.
Flour
Provides the structure that turns the dough stiff enough to roll and cut.

The step that matters

Rolling the dough thin. Thin dough bakes through and crisps evenly. Thick dough stays soft in the middle and can spread or brown unevenly, so the thickness should be kept consistent across all rounds.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, milk, caraway, 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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