Skip to main content
Dessert

Peanut Butter Cookies

A simple cookie made with peanut butter, butter, sugar, flour, baking soda, and an egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and flour 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 ↓

Peanut Butter Cookies

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Cream together the peanut butter and butter.

  2. Gradually add the brown and white sugars, creaming well.

  3. Add the beaten egg and mix thoroughly.

  4. Sift together the flour and baking soda, then add to the mixture, beating well.

Shape and bake

  1. Drop one level teaspoon of the mixture onto a cookie sheet.

  2. Press down each cookie with a fork.

  3. Bake for 10 minutes in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Peanut + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,427 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Peanut + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,754 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

Peanut butter
Provides fat and nutty flavor, and keeps the cookies tender and moist.
Egg
Binds the dough and adds structure as it sets in the oven.
Cake flour
Provides the structure that holds the cookies together as they bake.
Baking soda
Reacts to lift the dough and helps the cookies spread and brown.
Brown sugar
Adds moisture, caramel flavor and helps the cookies brown.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cookies spread and crisp at the edges.

The step that matters

Pressing each cookie with a fork. The dough is soft and has little flour structure, so pressing flattens it to an even thickness and helps it bake through without spreading unevenly.

Swap the peanut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Macadamia nutfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peanutthe original

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

You might also like

Peanut CandyPeanut Candy82 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes