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Breakfast

Plain Pancakes

A simple batter of eggs, milk, flour, and butter or lard, cooked into thin pancakes and served with sugar, lemon juice, or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Plain Pancakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Separate the yolks and whites of the eggs.

  2. Beat the yolks well and add the milk.

  3. Gradually mix in the flour until the batter is smooth.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

Cook and serve

  1. Heat a small frying pan and melt the butter or lard until it bubbles.

  2. Pour in enough batter to cover the pan thinly.

  3. Cook until one side is browned, about 2-3 minutes.

  4. Turn the pancake using a jerk of the pan or a broad slice.

  5. Cook until browned on both sides.

  6. Keep pancakes warm until all are cooked.

  7. Serve with sugar, lemon juice, or cream.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 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

Eggs
Whites beaten and folded in add lightness and help the pancakes rise.
Flour
Forms the structure of the batter so the pancakes hold together when cooked.
Milk
Makes the batter pourable and adds moisture to the pancakes.
Butter or fresh lard
Greases the pan and adds fat that helps the pancake brown.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the whites, which gives the pancakes lift. Stirring hard would deflate the foam and leave them dense.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk, 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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