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Dessert

Sour Cream Cookies. No. 1

Cookies made with sour cream, butter, sugar, eggs, flour, baking soda, and lemon essence.

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 ↓

Sour Cream Cookies. No. 1

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.

Make the dough

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

  2. In a bowl, beat the eggs well.

  3. Add the sugar, melted butter, and sour cream or milk to the eggs.

  4. Dissolve the baking soda in the milk and mix it into the batter.

  5. Gradually add flour until the dough is manageable but not too stiff.

  6. Flavor the dough with essence of lemon.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough to a thickness of your choice, but do not roll very thin.

  2. Cut into desired shapes and place on a baking sheet.

  3. Bake in the preheated oven until lightly 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

Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and richness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cookies brown lightly.
Melted butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor.
Sour cream
Adds moisture and acidity that tenderizes the dough.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour cream to help the cookies rise.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together.

The step that matters

Adding the flour. Flour should be added gradually until the dough is manageable but not stiff. Too much flour makes the cookies dense and dry, since flour proteins and starch absorb liquid and firm up the dough.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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