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Dessert

Rolled Oats Cookies

A sweet cookie made with rolled oats, butter, sugar, eggs, raisins, nuts, figs, and optional orange peel or almond extract.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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.

Prepare

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

Make the dough

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

  2. Add the beaten eggs and sweet cream, mixing well.

  3. Stir in the rolled oats, baking soda, flour, raisins, nuts, and figs.

  4. Flavor the mixture with grated orange peel or almond extract.

Bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the dough 2 inches apart onto a buttered baking sheet.

  2. Bake 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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with the sugar to add fat and a tender, rich texture.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the cookies brown.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure as the cookies set.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cookies together.
Rolled oats
Add chewy texture and body to the dough.
Baking soda
Reacts to lift the dough and help the cookies spread and rise.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Mixed nutsfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, cream, 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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