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Dessert

Sugar Gingerbread

A sweet gingerbread dough made with butter, sugar, eggs, sour milk, baking soda, salt, and ground ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Sugar Gingerbread

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. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  2. Add the eggs and sour milk, mixing well.

  3. Sift together the baking soda, salt, and ground ginger, then add to the mixture and mix until combined.

  4. Roll the dough out thin.

Bake

  1. Bake on greased baking sheets at 350°F (175°C) 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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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 fat, which helps give the cookies a tender texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough, helps it brown, and creams with the butter to trap air.
Eggs
Add structure and binding so the dough holds together when rolled.
Sour milk
Adds moisture and acidity that reacts with the baking soda to help it rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour milk to produce gas that lightens the dough.
Ground ginger
Provides the characteristic warm, spicy aroma and flavor of gingerbread.

The step that matters

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beating solid fat with sugar traps air bubbles in the mixture. These bubbles expand in the oven and help the cookies stay light, so under-creaming can leave them dense.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Gingerthe original
  4. Parsleyfits about as well

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