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Dessert

Oatmeal Cookies

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

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

Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. 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.

Prepare the dough

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

  2. Cream together the butter and sugar.

  3. Add the beaten eggs and sweet milk to the mixture.

  4. Dissolve the baking soda in boiling water and add it to the mixture.

  5. Mix the spices with the flour and sift them together.

  6. Add the rolled oats and the flour mixture to the wet ingredients.

Bake

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

  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.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  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. Raisin + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,070 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

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 trap air and add richness and tenderness to the cookies.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and moisture as the cookies set.
Baking soda
Reacts with the mixture to lift the cookies and help them spread and brown.
Rolled oats
Add chewy texture and body to the dough.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cookies together as they bake.

The step that matters

Bake until golden brown. Baking only until golden brown keeps the centers soft and chewy, since cookies continue to firm up as they cool. Overbaking dries them out and makes them hard.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Gingerfits about as well
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, milk, raisin, 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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