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Dessert

Oat Meal Cookies

A sweet cookie made with butter, lard, sugar, eggs, sour milk, baking soda, baking powder, oatmeal, flour, raisins, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

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.

Prepare the dough

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

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

  3. Add the eggs and sour milk, mixing well.

  4. Stir in the baking soda, baking powder, oatmeal, flour, and raisins.

  5. Flavor the mixture with nutmeg, cinnamon, or vanilla as desired.

Shape and bake

  1. For rocks, drop batter by teaspoonfuls onto greased paper.

  2. For cookies, roll out the dough and cut with a cookie cutter.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and flavor, and helps the cookies brown and spread.
Lard
Adds tenderness and a soft, short texture to the cookies.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps it brown during baking.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and moisture.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the leavening to help the cookies rise.
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.

Swap the raisin

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

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

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