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Dessert

Chocolate Cookies

A sweet cookie made with brown sugar, flour, butter, raisins, nuts, chocolate, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Chocolate Cookies

Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Chocolate Cookies

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. Dissolve the baking soda in a little buttermilk or sour milk.

  2. In a bowl, mix the brown sugar, flour, melted butter, chopped raisins, chopped nuts, melted chocolate, and sweet milk in the order given.

Shape and bake

  1. Drop small tablespoonfuls of the mixture onto baking sheets.

  2. Bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) until done.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 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. Nuts + chocolatetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Raisin + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cookies together as they bake.
Brown sugar
Adds moisture, sweetness and chewiness, and helps the cookies brown.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor, and helps the dough spread.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in buttermilk or sour milk to produce gas that helps the cookies rise.
Chocolate
Adds rich chocolate flavor and some fat to the dough.

The step that matters

Dissolve the baking soda first. Baking soda only leavens when it reacts with an acid. Dissolving it in buttermilk or sour milk before mixing spreads it evenly through the dough, so the cookies rise uniformly instead of in patches or with a bitter, soapy taste.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, butter, raisin, chocolate, 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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