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Dessert

Sugar-drops

Sugar drops are small butter cookies topped with sugar-plums, baked until lightly golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,623 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sugar-drops

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, cream together the butter and sugar.

  2. Add the flour, grated nutmeg, and eggs; mix until well combined.

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

  4. Place sugar-plums on top of each drop.

Bake

  1. Bake for 20 minutes or until lightly golden.

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 + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Nutmeg + plumtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together185 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Adds fat and richness, helping the drops stay tender and spread slightly while baking.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and, creamed with butter, traps air that lightens the texture.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the drops together as they set in the oven.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and moisture as they set during baking.

The step that matters

Creaming the butter and sugar. Beating butter and sugar together until light traps air bubbles that help the drops rise and give a tender crumb. Under-creaming leaves a dense, heavy texture.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Plumthe original

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