Skip to main content
Dessert

Ginger

A sweet ginger cookie made with butter, sugar, eggs, milk, ground ginger, baking powder, and flour.

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

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Ginger

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Warm butter and sugar, then stir to cream.

  2. Add eggs, then slightly warmed milk, followed by ginger and baking powder.

  3. Mix in most of the flour until combined.

  4. Knead dough on floured surface until soft enough to handle.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out dough.

  2. Sift granulated sugar over dough.

  3. Roll again with rolling pin.

  4. Cut out shapes.

  5. Bake carefully.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Ginger + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 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
Creams with the sugar to give the cookies richness and a tender crumb.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and richness.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cookies rise and lighten.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure and rollable body.
Ground ginger
Provides the warm, spicy aroma that defines the cookie.

The step that matters

Knead until soft enough to handle. Adding too much flour or overworking the dough makes it tough and dry, because gluten develops with handling. Stop kneading once the dough is soft and workable so the cookies stay tender.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Jalapenofits better
  4. Gingerthe original

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

More ginger cookies recipes

Molasses 14Soft 9Wakefield 3 See all 179 →

You might also like

Ginger CakeGinger Cake93 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesSoft Ginger CakeSoft Ginger Cake56 recipesGinger Pound CakeGinger Pound Cake29 recipes