Skip to main content
Breakfast

Pancakes

A batter of eggs, milk, flour, ginger, and salt cooked in butter or lard to make pancakes.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs well, leaving out half the whites.

  2. Stir the eggs into the milk.

  3. Mix the flour with a little milk, then gradually add the rest of the milk to the flour mixture.

  4. Add the ginger and salt and stir the batter well.

Cook the pancakes

  1. Heat butter or lard in a pan.

  2. Pour a ladleful of batter into the pan, moving it to spread evenly, and shake the pan.

  3. When one side is golden, flip the pancake and cook until both sides are golden.

  4. Place the cooked pancake on a 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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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 richness and structure to the cooked pancakes.
Milk
Provides the liquid that hydrates the flour and makes the batter pourable.
All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the pancakes as its starch sets during cooking.
Butter or lard
Fat for frying that helps the pancakes brown evenly and release from the pan.

The step that matters

Spreading and flipping the pancake. Pouring the batter and moving it to spread evenly gives a thin, even pancake that cooks through. Flipping too early, before the underside has set and turned golden, can tear it.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

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

Rice GruelRice Gruel28 recipesPeptoned Milk GruelPeptoned Milk Gruel9 recipes