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Dessert

Drop Oatmeal Cookies

A simple drop cookie made with rolled oats, sugar, eggs, raisins, nuts, spices, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Drop Oatmeal Cookies

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the dough

  1. Mix rolled oats and Crisco, then let stand for 1 hour.

  2. Add sugar, beaten eggs, raisins, nuts, nutmeg, cinnamon, baking soda, flour, and hot water or sour milk.

Bake

  1. Drop 1 teaspoon of the mixture for each cookie onto a baking pan.

  2. Bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rolled oats
Provide the chewy, hearty body that gives the cookies their structure.
Crisco
Adds fat that tenderizes the dough and carries flavor.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure as the cookies set.
Flour
Gives the dough structure so the cookies hold their shape while baking.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidity of sour milk, if used, to help the cookies rise and brown.
Sugar
Sweetens the cookies and promotes browning at the surface.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Flaxseedfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oats, sugar, egg, raisin, nutmeg, 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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