Skip to main content
Dessert

Oatmeal Drop Cookies

A sweet cookie made with oats, flour, raisins, spices, and melted fat baked at 350°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Oatmeal Drop Cookies

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

Make the dough

  1. Sift together the flour, salt, baking powder, and spices; then add the raisins and oats.

  2. In a separate bowl, mix the corn syrup, melted fat, milk, and brown sugar.

  3. Gradually add the liquid mixture to the dry ingredients and stir well.

Bake

  1. Drop by small teaspoons onto a greased baking sheet.

  2. Bake for about 15 minutes.

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

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

  4. Syrup + sugartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Flour + cinnamontop 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

Rolled oats
Adds chewy body and a hearty texture to the dough.
All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cookies together as they bake.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cookies rise and lighten.
Corn syrup
Adds sweetness and moisture, helping the cookies stay soft and chewy.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness, moisture, and a caramel-like flavor to the cookies.
Melted fat
Coats the flour and oats, tenderizing the crumb and adding richness.

The step that matters

Gradually add the liquid mixture to the dry ingredients and stir well. Adding liquid slowly and stirring until evenly combined distributes moisture so the dough hydrates evenly. Overmixing after the flour is wet can develop gluten and make the cookies tough.

Swap the raisin

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against oats, flour, corn, syrup, sugar, milk, 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.

You might also like

Corn CakeCorn Cake90 recipesCorn Starch CakeCorn Starch Cake89 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesClove CakeClove Cake53 recipes