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Dessert

Indian Batter Cakes

A batter made from Indian meal, wheat flour, eggs, yeast, salt, and milk, baked into cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,418 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Indian Batter Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Warm the milk and mix in the yeast and salt, stirring well.

  2. Beat the eggs and stir them into the mixture.

  3. Gradually stir in the wheat flour and Indian meal.

  4. Cover the batter and let it rise for 4 to 5 hours, or mix it the night before if it's cold.

  5. If the batter is sour in the morning, dissolve 1 teaspoon of pearl‑ash in water and stir it into the batter, letting it sit for at least 30 minutes.

Cook the cakes

  1. Grease a baking iron and pour a ladle‑full of batter onto it.

  2. Cook until brown on one side, then turn the cake to cook the other side.

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. Wheat + milktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Bind the batter and add richness and structure to the cakes.
Brewer's yeast
Ferments the batter so it rises and develops a light, airy texture.
Indian meal
Forms the main body of the cakes and gives them their grainy texture.
Wheat flour
Adds gluten-forming protein that helps the batter hold its structure.
Milk
Provides the liquid that hydrates the meal and flour into a pourable batter.

The step that matters

Letting the batter rise. Yeast needs time and mild warmth to ferment; rising too short leaves the cakes dense, while an overlong rise lets the batter turn sour, which is why the record adds pearl-ash as a correction.

“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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