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Breakfast

Pancakes Without Eggs

A batter of flour, ale, dripping or lard, and moist sugar is fried into pancakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Pancakes Without Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix the flour with the ale and beat the batter for 15 minutes.

Fry and stack

  1. Melt the dripping or lard in a small frying pan.

  2. Pour in one quarter of the batter and fry both sides until pale brown.

  3. Stack the pancakes with 2 teaspoons of moist sugar sprinkled between each.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Dried flour
Provides the starch and structure that hold the batter together as it cooks.
Mild ale
Adds liquid and its carbonation helps lighten the batter.
Dripping or lard
Fat for frying that conducts heat and browns the pancake surface.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture to the pancakes stacked with it.

The step that matters

Frying the pancakes. The fat must be hot before the batter goes in so the pancake sets quickly and browns evenly. Batter poured into cool fat soaks up grease and sticks to the pan.

“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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