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Breakfast

Plain Pancakes

A simple batter of flour, milk, eggs, nutmeg, lemon peel, and optional sugar, fried into pancakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Plain Pancakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Combine flour, nutmeg, lemon peel, and sugar if desired in a basin.

  2. Mix half of the milk with the flour.

  3. Beat the remaining milk with the eggs, then combine with the flour mixture.

  4. Beat well, adding a little more milk to achieve a thick batter.

Fry the pancakes

  1. Melt butter in a pan.

  2. Fry the pancakes, adding sugar between each as you cook.

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 + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

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

Flour
Forms the structure of the batter as it binds with the liquid.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the pancakes set and hold together.
Milk
Provides the liquid that hydrates the flour and loosens the batter.
Butter
Adds fat for frying, helping the pancakes brown and release from the pan.

The step that matters

Beat well, adding a little more milk to achieve a thick batter. Thorough beating develops the batter evenly and removes lumps, while the right liquid ratio gives a thick batter that holds its shape. Too thin a batter spreads and cooks unevenly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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