Skip to main content
Dessert

Rich Oatmeal Cookies

These are oatmeal cookies made with butter, brown sugar, eggs, flour, baking soda, cinnamon, oats, raisins, and nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Rich Oatmeal 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 the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the dough

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

  2. Add the eggs and mix well.

  3. In another bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, and cinnamon.

  4. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture.

  5. Stir in the rolled oats, raisins, and chopped nuts.

Bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the dough onto a baking pan.

  2. Bake for 10-12 minutes or 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. 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. Cinnamon + oatstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,394 recipes

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

  4. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Raisin + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 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

Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air and add richness and tender texture.
Brown sugar
Adds moisture, caramel flavor, and softness to the cookies.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and richness as they set.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cookies together as they bake.
Baking soda
Reacts with the dough to help the cookies rise and spread and brown.
Rolled oats
Add chewy texture and a hearty, nutty body to the cookies.

The step that matters

Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture. Adding flour gradually and mixing gently keeps the dough from overdeveloping gluten, which would make the cookies tough.

Swap the nuts

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, flour, cinnamon, oats, raisin. 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 oatmeal cookies recipes

Date 3 See all 164 →

You might also like

Cinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipes