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Old-Fashioned Batter Cakes

A skillet cake made from flour, cottonseed meal, butter, milk, and honey.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Old-Fashioned Batter Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour and cottonseed meal together.

  2. Add Jersey milk gradually until you achieve a smooth batter.

Cook and serve

  1. Heat a skillet and melt some Jersey butter.

  2. Pour the batter into the skillet to form cakes.

  3. Cook until golden brown on both sides.

  4. Serve warm with honey.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Flour + cottonseedtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together22 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + honeytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,336 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + honeytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,327 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Provides the main structure of the cakes as its starch and proteins set during cooking.
Jersey milk
Adds moisture and hydrates the flour to form a smooth, pourable batter.
Jersey butter
Adds fat for browning the cakes in the skillet and gives a rich flavor.
Honey
Adds sweetness and flavor to the warm cakes when served.

The step that matters

Cook until golden brown on both sides. Browning comes from Maillard reactions between sugars and proteins on a hot, buttered surface. Cooking too briefly leaves the centre doughy, while too much heat scorches the outside before the inside sets.

“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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