Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓
Pancakes Without Eggs
Ingredients
Directions
Make the batter
Mix the flour with the ale and beat the batter for 15 minutes.
Cook and stack
Melt the dripping or lard in a small frying pan.
Pour in ¼ of the batter and fry both sides until pale brown.
Stack the pancakes with 2 teaspoons of moist sugar sprinkled between each.
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.
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Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Dried flour
- Provides the starch and protein that set into the structure of each pancake.
- Mild ale
- Supplies the liquid that thins the batter, and its bubbles help it rise lightly.
- Dripping or lard
- Fat that keeps the pancake from sticking and helps its surface brown in the pan.
- Moist sugar
- Adds sweetness and a moist layer between the stacked pancakes.
The step that matters
Frying until pale brown. Browning comes from sugars and proteins reacting with heat. If the pan is too hot, the outside darkens before the centre sets; if it is too cool, the pancake absorbs fat and turns greasy and tough.
“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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