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Dessert

Batter Cakes Without Eggs

A quick, eggless cake made from buttermilk, flour, baking soda, salt, and butter, cooked on a griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Buttermilk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,721 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Batter Cakes Without Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine buttermilk, baking soda, and salt.

  2. Gradually add flour and melted butter, mixing until smooth.

  3. Beat the mixture until it is light and foamy.

Cook

  1. Preheat a griddle over medium-high heat and grease lightly.

  2. Pour batter onto the griddle and cook until bubbles form, then flip and cook until golden.

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. Buttermilk + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Buttermilk + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,674 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Buttermilk
Provides liquid and acidity that reacts with baking soda to lift the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic buttermilk to produce gas, helping the cakes rise.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the cakes as its proteins set during cooking.
Melted butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a richer flavor and browning on the griddle.

The step that matters

Beat the mixture until light and foamy. Beating traps air in the batter, which expands during cooking and gives the cakes lift in place of eggs. Under-beating leaves the cakes 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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