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Fine Pancakes

A pancake made with eggs, cream, butter, rice flour, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, and lemon, fried until browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Fine Pancakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs in a bowl.

  2. Add the cream and butter, mixing well.

  3. Incorporate the rice flour and sweeten with sugar.

  4. Season with nutmeg, cinnamon, or lemon to taste.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the batter in a lightly greased pan until browned on both sides.

  2. Serve hot, sprinkled with sugar and sliced lemon.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Rice + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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 set during frying to give the pancakes structure.
Rice flour
Forms the body of the batter; being gluten-free, it gives a more tender, delicate crumb.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, producing a softer pancake.
Butter
Adds fat for flavour and helps the pancakes brown in the pan.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps the surface brown during frying.

The step that matters

Fry the batter in a lightly greased pan until browned on both sides. Rice flour has no gluten, so the batter is fragile and can tear or stick if the pan is too hot or too cold. Moderate heat and a light grease let the eggs set and the sugars brown evenly before turning.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, cream, butter, rice, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cream, butter, rice, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon. 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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