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Stale Bread Griddle Cakes

A griddle cake made from stale breadcrumbs soaked in milk, mixed with eggs, flour, butter, salt, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Stale Bread Griddle Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Soak the stale breadcrumbs in boiling milk for 1 hour.

  2. Beat the egg yolks until light.

  3. Add the beaten yolks, flour, melted butter, and salt to the soaked breadcrumbs and mix well.

  4. Gently stir in the baking powder and beaten egg whites.

Cook

  1. Grease a griddle and cook small, thin cakes 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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Stale breadcrumbs
Soak up the hot milk to form the body of the batter and give a tender, bread-based texture.
Eggs
Yolks enrich the batter and richness; whipped whites add lift and a lighter crumb.
All-purpose flour
Adds structure so the cakes hold together when turned on the griddle.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter to help the cakes rise and become light.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the cakes brown on the griddle.

The step that matters

Gently stir in the baking powder and beaten egg whites. Folding rather than stirring vigorously keeps the air trapped in the beaten whites and the gas from the baking powder, so the cakes stay light instead of dense.

“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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