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Dessert

Peanut Cookies

Peanut cookies made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, baking powder, salt, peanuts, lemon juice, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Peanut Cookies

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the eggs, flour, baking powder, salt, chopped peanuts, lemon juice, and milk, then mix well.

  3. Test one cookie first. More flour may be needed.

Bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the dough onto an unbuttered baking sheet.

  2. Bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) for 12 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Peanut + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,048 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour 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

Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air and give the cookies a tender, rich texture.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure as they set in the oven.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cookies together as they bake.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cookies rise and become lighter.
Peanuts
Add nutty flavor and a bit of richness and texture throughout the cookies.

The step that matters

Test one cookie first. More flour may be needed.. Dough consistency varies with ingredients and mixing, and too much moisture makes cookies spread thin and flat. A test cookie shows whether the dough holds its shape before the whole batch goes into the oven.

Swap the peanut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Milletfits better
  4. Peanutthe original

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