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Dessert

Bread-crumb Griddles

A griddle cake made from stale bread crumbs, milk, eggs, and flour, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Bread-crumb Griddles

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Warm the milk and pour it over the bread crumbs.

  2. Let it stand for 15 minutes.

  3. Beat the mixture with the yolks of the eggs.

  4. Add the salt and creamed butter, then gradually mix in the flour combined with the baking soda and cream of tartar.

  5. If the batter is not stiff enough, cautiously add a little more flour.

  6. Fold in the beaten egg whites until stiff.

Cook

  1. Bake until golden, being careful not to stack the cakes when serving.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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
Yolks enrich the batter and whites, beaten stiff and folded in, lighten the pancakes.
Bread crumbs
Soaked in warm milk, they add body and a soft, moist crumb to the batter.
Flour
Provides structure that holds the batter together once it is set by heat.
Baking soda
Reacts with the cream of tartar to produce gas that makes the pancakes rise.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter so it reacts with baking soda, helping the pancakes rise.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Whites beaten to stiff peaks trap air that expands in the heat and lightens the pancakes. Overmixing after folding them in deflates the foam, leaving the cakes dense.

“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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