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Breakfast

Soda Griddle Cakes

A quick batter of sour milk, eggs, flour, and baking soda, fried into cakes and served with butter, sugar, or nutmeg.

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 ↓

Soda Griddle Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Combine sour milk and eggs in a bowl.

  2. Add flour gradually until the batter is not very thick.

  3. Stir in the baking soda.

Cook and serve

  1. Heat a griddle.

  2. Pour batter to form cakes.

  3. Fry quickly until golden brown on both sides.

  4. For tea, spread with butter, sugar, and nutmeg; for breakfast, serve plain.

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 + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness to the cakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk's acidity to produce gas that lifts and lightens the cakes.
Sour milk
Provides liquid and acidity that activates the baking soda and adds tang.
Flour
Forms the body of the batter, giving the cakes their structure as they set.

The step that matters

Stir in the baking soda. Baking soda reacts with the acid in sour milk as soon as it is mixed in, releasing gas. Batter left standing or stirred too long loses that lift, so the cakes should be griddled promptly after mixing.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, egg, flour, butter, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Jalapenofits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, flour, butter, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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