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Baking

Oatmeal Cookies

A baked cookie made with butter, lard, sugar, sour milk, baking soda, salt, baking powder, cinnamon, oats, flour, raisins, and walnuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Oatmeal Cookies

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 ↓

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).

  2. Sift the salt, baking soda, baking powder, and cinnamon with the flour.

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix the butter and lard with the sugar until creamy.

  2. Add the sour milk and mix well.

  3. Gradually add the flour mixture, oats, raisins, and walnuts.

  4. Drop the batter by teaspoonfuls onto a greased baking pan.

Bake

  1. 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  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 and lard
Fat that creams with sugar to give the cookies tenderness and richness.
Sugar
Sweetness, and it helps the cookies brown and spread as they bake.
Sour milk
Acidity that reacts with the baking soda to help the cookies rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that lifts the cookies.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cookies together as they bake.
Rolled oats
Adds chewy texture and bulk to the dough.

The step that matters

Drop the batter by teaspoonfuls onto a greased baking pan.. Spacing and portion size control spread and browning; dough dropped too large or too close together can bake unevenly and merge into one sheet.

Swap the walnut

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

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

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

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