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Dessert

Sweet Milk Griddle Cakes

A batter of flour, eggs, milk, and butter cooked on a griddle to make sweet pancakes.

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 ↓

Sweet Milk Griddle Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Sift together the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar into a mixing bowl.

  2. Beat the eggs until light and stir them along with 1 cup of milk into the flour mixture.

  3. Add the melted butter and mix thoroughly.

  4. Add more milk as needed to achieve a batter consistency similar to thick cream.

  5. Beat the batter well before frying.

Fry and turn

  1. Preheat a large griddle until uniformly hot and lightly grease it with a bit of fat on a fork.

  2. Drop batter from a spoon to form round cakes of uniform size.

  3. When bubbles form and the tops look dry, turn the cakes over with a cake turner or broad knife.

  4. If any batter spills out, push it back to avoid waste and ragged edges.

  5. When the cakes stop puffing, they are usually brown and done.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Flour
Forms the structure of the pancakes as the batter sets when cooked.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the batter bind and cook up tender.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and sets the batter's consistency, giving the cakes their softness.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, making the cakes rise and puff.
Melted butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a rich flavor in the finished cakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown on the griddle.

The step that matters

Turning the cakes. Turn only when bubbles form and the tops look dry. Turning too early tears the cakes, because the surface has not yet set enough to hold its shape while the underside finishes cooking.

“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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