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Dessert

Oat Meal Cookies

A baked cookie made with eggs, sugar, nutmeg, sweet milk, raisins, rolled oats, butter, lard, flour, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 ↓

Oat Meal 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 the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, beat the eggs and mix in the sugar and grated nutmeg.

  2. Dissolve the baking soda in the sweet milk and add to the mixture.

  3. Stir in the cut raisins, rolled oats, butter, and lard.

  4. Gradually add flour until the dough is manageable.

Bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto an inverted pan.

  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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Nutmeg + raisintop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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

Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and richness to the cookies.
Baking soda
Reacts with the milk and dough to help the cookies rise and brown.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together as it bakes.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavor.
Lard
Adds fat that keeps the cookies tender and moist.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps the cookies brown.

The step that matters

Gradually add flour until the dough is manageable. Adding too much flour at once makes the dough stiff and dry, producing tough cookies. Adding it gradually lets you stop once the dough is workable, keeping the texture tender.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Gingerfits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

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