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Dessert

Pink Pancakes

A pancake made with beetroot pulp, flour, milk, eggs, nutmeg, and powdered sugar, served with jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Beetroot and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pink Pancakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beetroot

  1. Peel the boiled beetroot and cut it into slices.

  2. Pound the beetroot slices in a mortar until smooth.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour, milk, and eggs until well combined.

  2. Add the nutmeg and powdered sugar, then mix well.

  3. Fold the beetroot pulp into the batter.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the pancakes quickly until golden brown.

  2. Serve rolled with a little jam inside each pancake.

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. Beetroot + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together124 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beetroot + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together515 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Milk and flour 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

Beetroot
Adds colour, earthy flavour and moisture to the batter.
Eggs
Bind the batter and set as the pancakes cook, giving structure.
Flour
Provides the starch that gives the pancakes body and structure.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and makes the batter pourable and tender.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pancakes brown in the pan.

The step that matters

Fry the pancakes quickly until golden brown. Beetroot adds moisture and sugar, so pancakes can scorch on the outside before the centre sets. Moderate heat and a quick fry give an even golden colour without burning.

Swap the beetroot

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Parsnipfits about as well
  4. Beetrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, flour, nutmeg, 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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