Skip to main content
Main

Pancakes and Fritters

A batter of eggs, flour, milk, nutmeg, and salt is fried into pancakes and can be made into apple fritters.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,230 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Pancakes and Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Break the eggs into a bowl and beat them with nutmeg and salt.

  2. Add flour and enough milk to create a smooth batter, thick as good cream.

Fry the pancakes

  1. Heat a clean frying pan and add a walnut-sized piece of butter.

  2. Once melted, pour in enough batter to cover the bottom of the pan, about ½ inch thick.

  3. Fry until light brown on both sides.

  4. Add 1 tablespoon more flour.

Make apple fritters

  1. Peel and slice apples, then core them.

  2. Dip in batter.

  3. Fry in hot lard.

  4. Drain on a sieve and sprinkle with loaf sugar before serving.

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 + walnuttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  3. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as they set.
Flour
Gives the batter body and structure so it holds together when cooked.
Milk
Loosens the flour into a smooth, pourable batter with a tender texture.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor and helps the pancakes brown in the pan.
Lard
Provides hot frying fat that crisps and browns the batter coating.

The step that matters

Fry in hot lard.. The fat must be hot enough to set the batter quickly. If it is too cool, the batter soaks up grease and turns heavy instead of crisp and golden.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Pistachiofits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

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

More pancakes recipes

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

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes