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Dessert

Rolled Oat Cookies

Rolled oat cookies made with rolled oats, wheat flour, butter, sugar, baking soda, hot water, raisins, and walnuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 Oat Cookies

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the dough

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

  2. In a bowl, mix the rolled oats, wheat flour, melted butter, sugar, and baking soda dissolved in hot water.

  3. Let the mixture stand for 1 hour.

  4. After an hour, add the chopped raisins and walnuts.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll the dough thin.

  2. Cut into desired shapes.

  3. Place the dough on a baking sheet.

  4. 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. Wheat + walnuttop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together246 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  3. Oats + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together473 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Oats + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together554 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 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

Rolled oats
Provide the main body and chewy structure of the cookie.
Wheat flour
Adds structure by forming gluten that holds the dough together.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richness and tenderness, and helps the cookies brown.
Sugar
Sweetens the cookies and aids browning in the oven.
Baking soda
Reacts with the mixture to help the cookies rise and spread and brown.

The step that matters

Let the mixture stand for 1 hour. Resting lets the oats and flour absorb the liquid, so the dough firms up and is easier to roll thin. Skipping the rest can leave a dough that is too loose to shape.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Flaxseedfits better
  3. Mixed nutsfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oats, wheat, flour, butter, sugar, 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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