Name: Corn-meal Flapjacks
Ingredients: 1 quart boiling milk; 2 cups white cornmeal; Sugar for serving

Why it works: Milk and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Corn-meal Flapjacks

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

1 quart boiling milk
2 cups white cornmeal
Sugar for serving

Directions

Make the batter

In a large bowl, combine boiling milk and cornmeal. Mix until well combined.
Heat a griddle over medium-high heat.

Cook and serve

Pour batter onto the griddle and cook until golden brown on both sides.
Serve rolled with sugar sprinkled between.

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.

Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Cornmeal: Forms the batter's structure and gives the flapjacks their grainy, sturdy texture.
Milk: Hydrates the cornmeal and adds moisture so the batter can spread and cook through.

“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.