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Dessert

Plain Cookies

A simple butter, sugar, egg, flour, baking powder, and vanilla cookie dough baked at 350°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Plain Cookies

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together thoroughly.

  2. Add the beaten eggs, then mix in the flour sifted with baking powder.

  3. Chill the dough, then roll out a small portion on a lightly floured board and cut into shapes.

Bake

  1. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) for 10 to 15 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. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + vanillatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + vanillatop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,050 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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 fat that makes the cookies tender and rich in flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and, creamed with butter, helps give a tender crumb.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add moisture and structure to the cookies.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cookies together as they bake.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven so the cookies rise and turn out lighter.
Vanilla
Adds aroma and a warm, sweet flavor to the cookies.

The step that matters

Cream the butter and sugar thoroughly. Beating butter and sugar together traps air in the fat. These air pockets expand in the oven and help give the cookies a lighter, more even texture.

Swap the vanilla

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillathe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Lemonfits less well

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