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Plain Griddle Cakes

A simple batter of flour, baking powder, salt, milk, egg yolk, and egg white cooked on a greased griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Plain Griddle Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt.

  2. Add enough milk to make a thin batter.

  3. Stir in the beaten yolk of the egg.

  4. Gently fold in the beaten egg white.

Cook

  1. Heat a griddle or pan and grease lightly.

  2. Drop batter by spoonfuls onto the griddle.

  3. Cook until puffed with bubbles and browned on the edges, then turn and bake 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + eggtop 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the cakes as the batter sets when cooked.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, causing the cakes to rise and become light.
Egg
Adds richness and structure, and the separately beaten white adds lightness.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and makes the thin batter that spreads and cooks through.

The step that matters

Gently fold in the beaten egg white. Beaten egg white holds air bubbles that give lightness. Stirring it hard deflates those bubbles, so folding gently keeps the cakes light and airy.

“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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