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Dessert

Chocolate Cookies

A simple chocolate cookie recipe with sugar, eggs, flour, baking powder, pecans, chocolate, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Chocolate Cookies

Why it works: Pecans and chocolate work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 804 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Chocolate Cookies

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

Make the dough

  1. Beat the eggs lightly, then add a pinch of salt and the sugar; beat again.

  2. Sift in the flour and baking powder, then add the grated chocolate and chopped pecans.

Bake

  1. Drop small balls of the mixture onto buttered baking sheets.

  2. Bake until set.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Pecans + chocolatetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together804 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + pecanstop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,280 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Eggs
Bind the mixture 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 lighten.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cookies brown and stay tender.
Sweet chocolate
Provides the chocolate flavor and richness throughout the cookies.

Swap the pecans

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Hazelnutfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Pecansthe original

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