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Dessert

Jumbles

A lemon-flavored cookie made with lemon zest, powdered sugar, flour, eggs, and butter, baked until pale and crisp.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Jumbles

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a brisk oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the lemon sugar

  1. Zest the lemons and mix the lemon zest with some sugar to create lemon sugar.

  2. Dry the lemon sugar, then reduce the dried lemon sugar to a powder.

  3. Sift the powdered lemon sugar with enough additional sugar to total 1 pound.

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix the lemon sugar with the flour, beaten eggs, and warm butter until combined.

Bake and serve

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto buttered baking sheets.

  2. Bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) for 20 to 30 minutes until pale and crisp.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 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

Powdered sugar
Sweetens the cookies and, as a fine powder, helps give them a delicate, crisp texture.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the spooned dough together as it bakes.
Large eggs
Bind the mixture and set as it bakes, giving structure to the cookies.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, contributing tenderness and flavor to the cookies.

The step that matters

Drying and powdering the lemon sugar. Lemon zest left damp will clump and not blend evenly into the sugar, so the lemon flavor and texture of the dough suffer. Fully dried zest grinds to a fine powder that mixes smoothly through the batter.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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