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Bread Pancakes

Bread pancakes made from soaked stale bread crumbs, flour, eggs, and butter, fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Bread Pancakes

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Bread Pancakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Soak the bread crumbs in the sour milk until soft.

  2. Run the soaked bread through a colander.

  3. Add the baking soda, flour, eggs, melted butter, and salt to the bread mixture. Beat well until combined.

Cook

  1. Fry the mixture slowly on a griddle 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, 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

Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda so the pancakes rise and turn tender.
Stale bread crumbs
Soaked until soft, they give the batter body and a moist, bread-like texture.
Flour
Adds structure so the batter holds together while it cooks.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help set the pancakes as they cook.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk to produce gas that lifts the batter.

The step that matters

Fry the mixture slowly on a griddle until golden brown. Cooking over low, steady heat lets the centre set before the outside browns too deeply. Browning comes from the Maillard reaction, which needs sugars and proteins at the surface. Too hot a griddle can scorch the outside while the inside stays raw.

“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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