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Dessert

Sweet Pancake

A batter of sweet milk, eggs, powdered sugar, butter, baking powder, and flour is baked into pancakes, layered with jelly, and topped with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Sweet Pancake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Separate the eggs and beat the whites and yolks until well frothed.

  2. Mix the melted butter, powdered sugar, and 1 cup of flour with the yolks and baking powder.

  3. Stir in the sweet milk and add more flour if needed to achieve a moderately thin batter.

Cook and assemble

  1. Bake small pancakes until thin and golden.

  2. Butter each pancake as it comes off the heat, layer four pancakes with thin layers of sweet jelly in between, and sprinkle powdered sugar on top.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Eggs
Whites trapped by whipping lift the batter and give the pancakes a light, tender structure.
Flour
Starch and gluten set during cooking, giving the pancakes their body and holding the batter together.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, helping the pancakes rise and become lighter.
Sweet milk
Provides the liquid that hydrates the flour and thins the batter, and helps the pancakes brown.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richness and tenderness, and helps the pancakes brown in the pan.

The step that matters

Adding flour to reach a moderately thin batter. Too much flour makes the batter thick and the pancakes dense, while too little makes them fragile and prone to tearing. Checking consistency before cooking keeps the texture right.

“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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