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Dessert

Flannel Cakes

Flannel cakes are sweet milk pancakes made with yeast, lard, eggs, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Flannel Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Combine sweet milk, yeast, and salt in a bowl to make a batter.

  2. Cover the batter and let it sit overnight.

Cook the cakes

  1. Add melted lard and beaten eggs to the batter in the morning.

  2. Heat a griddle and pour batter onto it, cooking the 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 + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Yeast
Ferments the batter overnight, producing gas bubbles that make the cakes light and airy.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the cakes set and hold their shape on the griddle.
Sweet milk
Provides the liquid that hydrates the batter and carries its flavor.
Lard
Adds fat for tenderness and helps the cakes brown on the griddle.

The step that matters

Letting the batter sit overnight. The yeast needs time to ferment the batter; cutting this short leaves the cakes dense rather than light and airy.

“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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