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Preserve

How to Use Olive Butter

A pancake made from egg whites and flour cooked in olive butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

How to Use Olive Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg whites until frothy.

  2. Gently stir in the flour.

Cook and serve

  1. Heat enough Olive Butter in a frying pan to cover the bottom.

  2. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture into the hot Olive Butter.

  3. Cook until browned on one side, then turn and brown the other side.

  4. Serve on a hot dish.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Olive + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Flour + olivetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,871 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Egg whites
Whipped to a froth, they trap air that lifts the pancakes.
Flour
Gently stirred in, it gives the pancakes body so they hold their shape.
Olive butter
Fat in the pan that conducts heat and browns the outside of the pancakes.

The step that matters

Gently stir in the flour. Overmixing after the egg whites are beaten knocks out the air they hold, so the pancakes turn out flat and dense instead of light.

“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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