Winter has arrived, so far carrying buckets of rain. Spreading a sweet aroma around the house by baking cookies is an excellent antidote to seasonal claustrophobia, when I start feeling caged within the walls of short, wet days. Guided on one hand by my Brown Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies (“What-if Cookies,” Jan. 13, 2022) and on the other by a recipe in Stacy Adimando’s The Cookiepedia, I experimented with another traditional sweet morsel of goodness, oatmeal raisin cookies, testing various versions, until I settled on the recipe here. Researching online, I read the first oatmeal cookie recipe in the U.S. can be found in Fannie Merritt Farmer’s The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896). You can look at the recipe online on page 406 of the 1901 edition of the book via Google Books. These are made with “fine oatmeal” and no raisins. In her later A New Book of Cookery (1912), Farmer published a recipe for Nut Oatmeal Cookies that uses rolled oats, raisins, nuts and spices, including cinnamon — close to how we make these cookies nowadays. I like looking at old recipes. They provide a list of ingredients with few details so they can be printed in two columns, followed by a few lines of terse instructions. I see them as polished kitchen notes or recordings of oral traditions. Back to the modern kitchen. My version of the recipe includes four steps to execute ahead of preparing the cookie dough: 1) browning the butter, 2) re-hydrating the raisins, 3) toasting the rolled oats and 4) toasting the sliced almonds. Additional personal touches include the use of coconut sugar and a variety of flours. The cookies are tender and sweet enough, with a contrast between plump raisins and crisp sliced almonds, while the rolled oats give them more body. They make up in flavor what they lack in good looks. It’s nice to have one in the afternoon with a steaming cup of rooibos tea. I like them a lot. Brown Butter Oatmeal Raisin Cookies I use local flours from Beck’s Bakery and Humboldt Grain Girls: soft white wheat (pastry) and rye flours (available at the Arcata Farmers Market and North Coast Co-op; local quinoa will hopefully be back in 2024). Eggs, especially farm fresh, vary in size. I recommend weighing the egg and using one just over 2 ounces. Makes 11 cookies. 4 tablespoons (2 ounces) unsalted butter 1 ½…