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Dessert

Oat Meal Cookies

A sweet cookie made with lard or butter, sugar, oats, flour, eggs, sour milk, raisins, and spices.

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 ↓

Oat Meal Cookies

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. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

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

Make the dough

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

  2. Beat in the eggs and sour milk.

  3. Mix in the rolled oats, baking soda, cinnamon, salt, and flour until well combined.

  4. Fold in the raisins.

Bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the dough onto a buttered baking sheet.

  2. Bake for 10-12 minutes or 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. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Oats + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,394 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

  5. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Lard or butter
Creams with sugar to trap air and give the cookies a tender, rich texture.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and moisture as the cookies set.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda to help the cookies rise and brown.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that lifts the dough.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cookies together as they bake.
Rolled oats
Add chewiness and a hearty texture to the cookies.

The step that matters

Bake until golden, not longer. Cookies keep baking on the hot sheet after leaving the oven. Pulling them once golden keeps them soft in the centre rather than dry and hard.

Swap the raisin

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

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

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