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Shorts Griddle Cakes

Griddle cakes made from wheat shorts, egg, sour milk and white flour, cooked on a hot griddle until golden brown.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Shorts Griddle Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Beat the egg in a bowl.

  2. Add sour milk, salt, oil, shorts, and flour to the egg and mix well.

  3. Heat the griddle until hot.

  4. Add baking powder and baking soda to the mixture and stir.

Cook

  1. Pour the batter onto the hot griddle and cook 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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Egg
Binds the batter and adds structure as it sets on the griddle.
Sour milk
Adds moisture and acidity that reacts with the leavening to help the cakes rise.
Shorts
Provides bran and coarse texture, giving the cakes a more rustic body.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidity of sour milk to produce gas that lightens the batter.
Baking powder
Supplies additional gas for rising and helps the cakes puff on the griddle.
White flour
Provides starch that sets during cooking, giving the cakes their structure.

The step that matters

Pour the batter onto the hot griddle and cook until golden brown. Leavening starts working as soon as the batter is mixed, so the batter should go onto a properly hot griddle without delay. A hot surface sets the outside quickly so the cakes rise and brown evenly rather than spreading or cooking pale.

“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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