Skip to main content
Main

Sour Milk Griddle-cakes

A batter of sour milk, flour, eggs, salt, butter, and baking soda cooked on a griddle into pancakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Sour Milk Griddle-cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Combine sour milk and enough sifted flour in a bowl to make a thick batter that runs from the dish.

  2. Add the beaten eggs, salt, melted butter, and dissolved baking soda.

Cook the pancakes

  1. Preheat a well-greased griddle over medium-high heat.

  2. Pour batter onto the griddle, cooking until bubbles form on the surface, then flip and brown 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 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 + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with baking soda to produce gas that lightens the pancakes.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as proteins set during cooking.
Flour
Provides the starch and gluten that thicken the batter and give the pancakes their body.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk's acid to release carbon dioxide, helping the pancakes rise.
Melted butter
Adds fat for tenderness, flavor, and browning on the griddle.

The step that matters

Wait for bubbles before flipping. Bubbles form as the leavening gas escapes and the batter sets from the bottom up. Flipping too early tears the pancake and deflates the rise, while waiting lets the underside set firmly.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes