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Dessert

Arrowroot Drops

Arrowroot Drops are small, soft cookies made with flour, butter, sugar, arrowroot, eggs, and lemon essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and arrowroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 525 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Arrowroot Drops

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Sift the flour and ammonia with the arrowroot onto a clean surface.

  2. In a bowl, beat the butter and sugar until smooth. Add the essence of lemon and the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.

  3. Gently mix in the flour mixture, adding a little milk to form a very soft dough.

Shape and bake

  1. Fill a piping bag with a plain half-inch tube with the mixture. Drop walnut-sized portions onto clean, buttered baking sheets.

  2. Bake in a cool oven at 300°F (150°C) for about 20 minutes.

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 + arrowroottop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together525 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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 main structure once mixed into the dough.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness and helps the creamed mixture hold air.
Sugar
Sweetens the drops and helps create a tender, lightly crisp texture when creamed with butter.
Arrowroot
Lightens the crumb and gives a delicate, tender texture compared with flour alone.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and add structure and richness as they are beaten in.
Carbonate of ammonia
Acts as a leavening agent, releasing gas in the oven to lift the drops.

The step that matters

Beating the eggs in one at a time. Adding each egg slowly and beating well lets the butter and sugar emulsify and trap air. If eggs are added too fast, the mixture can curdle and lose the air needed for a light texture.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Arrowrootthe original
  2. Asparagusfits about as well
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Sweet potatofits about as well

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