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Corn Meal Pancakes

A batter of cornmeal, salt, water, eggs, flour, baking powder, and egg whites cooked on a griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Corn Meal Pancakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Combine cornmeal and salt in a bowl.

  2. Pour boiling water over the mixture to create a batter.

  3. Stir in the beaten egg yolks and enough flour to achieve the right consistency.

  4. Add baking powder and mix well.

Cook

  1. Just before baking, gently fold in the beaten egg whites.

  2. Pour batter onto a hot griddle and cook until golden brown.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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 main body of the pancakes and gives them their grainy texture.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the batter together.
Egg whites
Whipped stiff and folded in, they add lightness and help the pancakes rise.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter to make the pancakes rise and stay airy.
Flour
Adjusts the batter's thickness so it holds together when cooked.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Whipped egg whites trap air that gives lift. Folding them in gently, just before cooking, keeps those bubbles from collapsing, so the pancakes stay light instead of flat and 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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