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Baking

Cookies Made Without Eggs

Cookies made without eggs using sugar, butter, sour milk, baking soda, flour, and optional spices, seeds, raisins, or figs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 Made Without Eggs

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.

Make the dough

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

  2. Add the sour milk and baking soda, mixing well.

  3. Gradually add flour until the batter is stiff enough to roll.

  4. Incorporate any desired spices, caraway seeds, raisins, or chopped figs.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough and cut into desired shapes.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) 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. Flour + carawaytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Raisin + figtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together737 recipes

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

  5. Caraway + raisintop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together75 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cookies brown as they bake.
Butter
Provides fat for tenderness and richness in the dough.
Sour milk
Supplies acidity and moisture to the dough.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour milk to lift and lighten the cookies.
Flour
Provides structure so the dough holds its shape when rolled and cut.

The step that matters

Adding the flour. Flour should be added gradually until the dough is stiff enough to roll. Too little leaves the dough sticky and hard to cut, while too much makes the cookies dry and tough as the gluten and starch set.

Swap the caraway

The recipe marks caraway as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, milk, flour, raisin, fig):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Carawaythe original
  4. Clovefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, milk, flour, raisin, fig. 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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