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Dessert

Cookies with Raisins

Cookies with raisins made with lard, sweet milk, and a raisin filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cookies with Raisins

Oven, in the book's wordsA fairly hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Cream together the sugar and lard.

  2. Slowly add the sweet milk, beaten egg, sifted flour, and baking powder.

  3. Roll out the dough thin and cut into shapes.

  4. Place on a baking pan.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, mix together ½ cup sugar, 1 tablespoon flour, and 1 cup boiling water.

  2. Add the chopped raisins and cook until thickened.

Assemble and bake

  1. Put a teaspoonful of filling on each cookie and place another cookie on top.

  2. Bake until 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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Lard
Adds fat that keeps the cookies tender and short in texture.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough and filled cookies together.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cookies rise and lighten.
Raisins
Provide sweetness and body to the filling once cooked down.
Egg
Binds the dough and adds richness and structure.

The step that matters

Cooking the raisin filling until thickened. The flour and boiling water must cook long enough to gelatinize the starch and thicken the filling. If it stays thin, it will run out of the sandwiched cookies while baking.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Blueberryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk, 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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