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Pancakes, Without Eggs or Milk

A simple batter of flour, salt, nutmeg, sugar, and mild ale is fried into pancakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,623 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Pancakes, Without Eggs or Milk

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour, salt, nutmeg, and sugar.

  2. Gradually add the mild ale to the dry ingredients to make a smooth batter.

  3. Beat the batter for 10 minutes.

Cook and serve

  1. Fry the pancakes in a skillet until golden brown.

  2. Serve with moist sugar sprinkled between the pancakes.

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. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Nutmeg + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Nutmeg and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,364 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the batter once mixed with liquid.
Mild ale
Provides the liquid and carbonation that lighten the batter in place of eggs.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pancakes brown in the skillet.

The step that matters

Beat the batter for 10 minutes. Beating develops the gluten in the flour, giving the batter structure so the pancakes hold together. Adding the ale gradually keeps the batter smooth, without lumps of dry flour.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar):

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Nutmegthe original
  4. Turmericfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar. 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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