Name: Currant Pancakes
Ingredients: ½ cup butter; a pinch of salt; 2 tablespoons sugar; sufficient flour to make a thin batter; 4 eggs; 2 tablespoons currants; ½ pint milk; grated rind of ½ lemon

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Currant Pancakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

Cream the butter and sugar together.
Add the beaten eggs and milk.
Mix in the salt and enough flour to create a thin batter.
Roll the dried currants in flour.
Fold the floured currants into the batter along with the grated lemon rind.

Bake and serve

Bake in 6‑inch rounds.
Serve the pancakes stacked with fruit or syrup.

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.

Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together78,219 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together19,053 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Eggs: Bind the batter and add structure as the pancakes set.
Butter: Adds richness and tenderness to the batter.
Flour: Forms the structure of the thin batter as it cooks.
Milk: Thins the batter to a pourable consistency and adds moisture.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and helps the pancakes brown.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, flour, egg, milk, lemon):

Vanillafits better
Raisinfits better
Figfits better
Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, flour, egg, milk, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.