Skip to main content
Main

Pancakes

A simple batter of flour, egg, milk, salt, sugar, lemon, and butter cooked into pancakes, served with lemon juice and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Pancakes

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 ↓

Pancakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix flour, egg, milk, and salt to make batter, then set aside.

Cook the pancakes

  1. Melt a piece of butter in a small frying pan until hot.

  2. Pour about ½ cup of batter into the pan, tilting it to ensure even thickness.

  3. Cook over medium heat until browned on one side, then flip and brown the other side.

  4. Transfer to kitchen paper, squeeze lemon juice, and dust with sugar.

  5. Roll up the pancake and place on a hot dish.

  6. Repeat until all batter is used and serve with lemon wedges around the dish.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the thin pancake together when cooked.
Egg
Binds the batter and helps set the pancake structure as it cooks.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter to a pourable consistency.
Butter
Fat for the pan that helps the pancake brown and release cleanly.

The step that matters

Cooking over medium heat. Too high a heat browns the outside before the centre sets, while too low a heat leaves the pancake pale and tough. Medium heat lets the surface brown evenly as the batter firms through.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, egg, milk, sugar, butter. 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.

More pancakes recipes

Buckwheat 148Rice 104French 71Cornmeal 65Potato 62Cream 36 See all 241 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes