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Dessert

Lemon Crackers

A simple sweet biscuit made with butter, sugar, eggs, baking soda, sweet milk, and lemon peel.

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 ↓

Lemon Crackers

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Cream together the butter and sugar until smooth.

  2. Add the eggs and mix well.

  3. Dissolve the baking soda in the sweet milk and add to the mixture.

  4. Incorporate the grated lemon peel or lemon flavoring.

Shape and bake

  1. Knead the dough very hard and roll it out very thin.

  2. Bake until light can be seen through the crackers.

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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Provides fat for a rich, tender crumb and a short, crisp bite.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps it brown during baking.
Eggs
Add structure and binding so the dough holds together when rolled.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid-free dough to lighten it and encourage browning.
Sweet milk
Dissolves the baking soda and adds moisture to the dough.

The step that matters

Roll the dough very thin. Thin dough dries and crisps evenly as it bakes, while thick pieces stay soft in the centre. Kneading very hard develops gluten, so the dough should be rolled out promptly to keep it from shrinking back.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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