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Dessert

Oatmeal Drop Cakes

A sweet drop cake made with oats, flour, raisins, and butter, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 ↓

Oatmeal Drop Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

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

  2. In a bowl, mix oats, flour, baking soda, and salt together.

Make the batter

  1. Melt the butter, then cream it with the sugar.

  2. Beat in the eggs.

  3. Stir in the sour milk and chopped raisins.

Bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto buttered pans.

  2. Bake until golden brown.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

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

  3. Cinnamon + oatstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,394 recipes

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

  4. Milk + buttertop 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

Butter
Melted and creamed with sugar, it adds richness and a tender crumb.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the cakes set in the oven.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk to produce gas, helping the cakes rise.
Sour milk
Its acidity activates the baking soda and adds tang and moisture.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cakes together.
Oats
Add chewiness and texture while absorbing moisture from the batter.

The step that matters

Stirring in the sour milk. The sour milk must be added so it can react with the baking soda; without this acid-base reaction the cakes will not rise properly. Once combined, the batter should be dropped and baked promptly so the gas produced is trapped while the cakes set.

Swap the raisin

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

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

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