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Stale Bread Griddle Cakes

A griddle cake made from stale bread soaked in milk or water and baked with eggs, sugar, salt, baking powder, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Stale Bread Griddle Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Soak the stale bread in milk or water overnight.

  2. In the morning, add salt, sugar, baking powder, and beaten eggs.

  3. Mix in enough flour to achieve the right batter consistency. Beat the mixture until smooth.

Cook

  1. Fry the batter in a skillet as you would for regular griddle cakes.

  2. If any leftover batter sours, add enough baking soda to correct it.

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. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Stale bread
Soaks up liquid and gives the batter body and a tender crumb.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during cooking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the griddle cakes rise and turn light.
Flour
Thickens the batter and adds structure to hold the cakes together.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown in the skillet.

The step that matters

Adding flour to the batter. Flour must be added until the batter reaches the right consistency. Too little leaves the batter thin and spreading, while too much makes the cakes dense and tough. Beating until smooth distributes the flour 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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