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Dessert

Health Cookies

Cookies made with oats, flour, nuts, raisins, and spices, baked at 350°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon 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 ↓

Health 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.

Make the dough

  1. Cream the shortening and sugar together.

  2. Add the eggs and re-cream the mixture.

  3. Mix in the rolled oats.

  4. Sift together the flour, cinnamon, baking soda, salt, and nutmeg.

  5. Add the dry ingredients alternately with the milk to the creamed mixture.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll the dough on a floured surface as thin as possible and cut into desired shapes.

  2. For sugar-coated cookies, sprinkle sugar on the dough while rolling.

  3. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C).

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

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

  5. Oats + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,394 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Shortening
Provides fat that makes the cookies tender and gives a short, crumbly texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps browning during baking.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cookies together.
Rolled oats
Add chewy texture and body to the dough.
Baking soda
Reacts with acid in the dough to help the cookies rise and spread.

The step that matters

Adding the dry ingredients alternately with the milk. Mix only until the flour is just combined. Overmixing develops gluten in the flour, which makes the cookies tough rather than tender.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Blueberryfits less well
  4. Figfits less well

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