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Soda Griddle Cakes

Soda griddle cakes are quick pancakes made with milk, baking soda, and flour, cooked on a greased griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Soda Griddle Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Combine milk, cream of tartar, and baking soda in a bowl.

  2. Gradually add flour until the batter is not very thick.

Cook and serve

  1. Grease a griddle with fat pork and heat it.

  2. Pour batter onto the griddle and fry quickly until golden brown.

  3. Spread butter, sugar, and nutmeg on the cakes before serving.

  4. Serve plain for breakfast.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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

Milk
Provides the liquid that moistens the batter and helps form its soft texture.
Cream of tartar
Acidic, reacting with baking soda to produce gas that lightens the cakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in cream of tartar to release carbon dioxide, making the cakes rise.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the batter into cakes as it cooks.

The step that matters

Pour batter onto the griddle and fry quickly until golden brown. The leavening gas from baking soda and cream of tartar forms as soon as the batter is mixed, so cooking should start promptly to keep the cakes light. Heat that is too low lets them spread and turn tough, while heat that is too high browns the outside before the inside sets.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, cream, flour, pork, butter, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Jalapenofits less well
  4. Gingerfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cream, flour, pork, butter, sugar. 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.

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