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Pea Pancakes

A pancake made with mashed green peas, eggs, milk, flour, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Pea Pancakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pea base

  1. Boil the peas until tender, then mash them while hot and rub through a colander.

  2. Season the mashed peas with pepper, salt, and butter, then let cool.

Make the batter

  1. Add the beaten egg yolks, cream, flour, baking soda, and cream of tartar to the cooled mixture; stir and beat well.

  2. Just before baking, fold in the beaten egg whites.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake like regular pancakes and serve hot.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Peas + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Peas + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

Green peas
Provide the main flavour and bulk, and moisture that shapes the batter.
Egg yolks
Add richness and emulsify the batter, helping it bind and brown.
Egg whites
Whipped and folded in, they add air and lift for a lighter pancake.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the pancakes together as they cook.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas that makes the pancakes rise.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter, reacting with the baking soda to produce lift and stabilise the whites.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Whites must be beaten to soft peaks and folded in gently just before baking. Overmixing deflates the foam, and waiting too long lets the batter lose the air and rise that the leavening depends on.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, butter, egg, cream, flour):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, egg, cream, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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