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Breakfast

Breakfast Cakes

A quick bread crumb cake made with dry wheat bread, eggs, milk, flour, cornmeal, and baking powder, fried on a griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and corn match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 465 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Breakfast Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crumbs

  1. Remove the brown crust from the dry wheat bread and cut it into small pieces.

  2. Pour enough hot water over the bread to thoroughly moisten it and allow it to cool.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix 2 eggs for each quart of crumbs with a pinch of salt.

  2. Stir in 1 cup of sweet milk and add equal parts flour and cornmeal until the mixture is the consistency of batter.

  3. Finally, fold in the beaten whites of 2 eggs and 2 teaspoons of baking powder.

Fry the cakes

  1. Use a tablespoon of the batter to fry each cake on a hot griddle.

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. Wheat + corntop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together465 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Wheat + milktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Wheat + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together209 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Dry wheat bread
Forms the body of the cakes and absorbs the liquid to become tender crumbs.
Eggs
Bind the crumbs together and add richness and structure to the batter.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and loosens the mixture to a batter consistency.
Flour and cornmeal
Provide body and structure so the batter holds its shape on the griddle.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lightens the cakes as they cook.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites and baking powder. Beaten whites trap air and baking powder releases gas when heated. Stirring them in hard or too long knocks out the air, leaving flatter, denser cakes.

“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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