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Snow Pancakes

A light pancake made with flour, lemon peel, salt, milk, butter or lard, and fresh snow, served with caster sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Snow Pancakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix flour, lemon peel, and salt.

  2. Add enough milk to create a thick batter and beat well with a wooden spoon.

  3. Quickly beat 1 tablespoon of fresh snow into the batter for each pancake.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat a small amount of butter or lard in a frying pan over medium heat.

  2. Pour batter into the pan and fry until lightly browned on both sides.

  3. Drain excess fat and place pancakes on a hot dish.

  4. Dredge with caster sugar, fold, and serve immediately.

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. 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. Lemon + milktop 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
Forms the structure of the batter that holds the pancake together.
Fresh snow
Adds air and lightness to the batter, so the pancakes rise tender rather than dense.
Butter or lard
Fat for frying that conducts heat and browns the pancake surface.

The step that matters

Quickly beat in the snow. Snow melts and its trapped air escapes once it warms, so it should be folded in quickly, just before frying, to keep the batter light.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against 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.

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