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Dessert

Indian Meal Flapjacks

A cornmeal pancake made with scalded milk, eggs, butter, and cold milk, cooked on a hot griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Indian Meal Flapjacks

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix and sift the cornmeal, salt, and sugar.

  2. Add enough scalded milk to moisten the cornmeal.

  3. Let the mixture cool, then add the butter.

  4. Beat the eggs and add them to the mixture.

  5. Stir in enough cold milk to make a thin batter.

Cook

  1. Cook on a well-greased, hot griddle like griddle cakes.

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

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

  2. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Yellow corn meal
Forms the main body of the flapjacks and gives them their characteristic grainy texture.
Scalded milk
Moistens the cornmeal so it softens and absorbs liquid before the batter is finished.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness to the cooked flapjacks.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture in the finished flapjacks.

The step that matters

Cook on a well-greased, hot griddle. Cornmeal batter has no gluten to hold it together, so it can stick or break if the griddle is not well greased and hot. A hot, greased surface sets the outside quickly so the flapjacks release cleanly and brown evenly.

“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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