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Dessert

Rolled Oats Cookies

A sweet cookie made with butter, sugar, sour milk, eggs, flour, baking soda, raisins, cinnamon, and rolled oats.

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

Rolled Oats 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 the dough

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

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

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

  4. In another bowl, sift together the flour and baking soda.

  5. Gradually add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients.

  6. Stir in the raisins, cinnamon, and rolled oats.

Shape and bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the dough onto buttered baking sheets.

  2. Smooth each cookie with a spoon dipped in milk.

  3. 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.

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

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

  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

Butter
Creams with sugar to give the cookies richness and a tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cookies and helps them brown during baking.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and richness to the cookies.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cookies together.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk to lift the cookies and help them spread.
Rolled oats
Add chewy texture and a hearty bite to the cookies.

The step that matters

Gradually add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients. Adding flour gradually and mixing only until combined keeps the dough from developing too much gluten, which would make the cookies tough.

Swap the raisin

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

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

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