Skip to main content
Dessert

Oatmeal Cookies

A sweet cookie made with oats, flour, sugar, and spices, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Oatmeal Cookies

Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Oatmeal Cookies

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Cream together the sugar, brown sugar, shortening, and eggs.

  2. Add the milk and mix well.

  3. Stir in the oatmeal, flour, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, baking soda, nuts, and raisins.

Bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of dough onto a baking sheet.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 15-20 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.

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 + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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

Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and richness to the cookies.
Baking soda
Reacts to lighten the dough and help the cookies rise and spread.
Shortening
Adds fat for tenderness and helps create a soft, rich texture.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cookies together as they bake.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cookies brown and stay moist.
Oatmeal
Adds chewy texture and a hearty, nutty body to the dough.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Milletfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, milk, flour, cinnamon, clove, nutmeg. 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.

More oatmeal cookies recipes

Date 3 See all 164 →

You might also like

Cinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesClove CakeClove Cake53 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes