Name: Flannel Cake Without Eggs
Ingredients: 1 cup sour cream or buttermilk; 1 teaspoon baking soda; salt to taste; flour, enough to make the consistency of ordinary griddle cakes

Why it works: Cream and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30,481 recipes. Both carry acetaldehyde, which smells pungent, ethereal. The science ↓

Flannel Cake Without Eggs

Ingredients

1 cup sour cream or buttermilk
1 teaspoon baking soda
salt to taste
flour, enough to make the consistency of ordinary griddle cakes

Directions

Make the batter

In a bowl, combine sour cream or buttermilk, baking soda, and salt.
Add flour gradually until you achieve a batter similar to griddle cakes.
Beat the mixture well, as the texture depends on thorough beating.

Cook

Preheat a griddle and pour the batter onto it.
Cook until golden brown on both sides.

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.

Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together30,481 recipes

Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sour cream or buttermilk: Provides acidity and moisture that react with baking soda to lift the batter.
Baking soda: Reacts with the acid in the dairy to produce gas, making the cake rise and turn light.
Flour: Forms the structure of the batter, setting as it cooks.

The step that matters

Beat the mixture well. Thorough beating develops the batter and distributes the baking soda evenly, which determines the cake's texture and rise. Under-beaten batter can cook up dense and unevenly risen.

“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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Flannel Cake Without Eggs