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Dessert

Wheat Cakes

A simple batter of sour milk, flour, egg, baking soda, and salt baked on a griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Wheat Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the sour milk and flour together at night.

  2. In the morning, add the beaten egg, baking soda, and salt.

Cook

  1. Bake on a griddle until golden brown.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Sour milk
Its acidity activates the baking soda and tenderizes the batter.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cakes together as they cook.
Egg
Binds the batter and adds richness and structure to the cakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk's acid to produce gas that makes the cakes rise.

The step that matters

Add the baking soda to the soured batter. Baking soda needs acid to release its gas, so it must be mixed into the sour milk batter in the morning and cooked soon after, before the leavening is spent.

“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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