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Breakfast

Pancakes

A simple batter of eggs, flour, and milk cooked into thin cakes, served with sugar, apricot preserve, or clotted cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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. In a bowl, mix the eggs, flour, and milk to create a smooth batter.

Cook the pancakes

  1. Heat a pan over medium heat and grease it with butter.

  2. Pour enough batter into the pan to cover the bottom thinly.

  3. Cook until the pancake is set and lightly browned; do not flip if very thin.

  4. Keep pancakes warm in a low oven until ready to serve.

Serve

  1. Serve stacked with sugar between layers or spread with apricot preserve and roll up.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Milk + apricottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together826 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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 set the structure of the thin pancake as it cooks.
Flour
Provides starch that thickens the batter and gives the pancake its body.
Milk
Thins the batter to a pourable consistency and adds moisture and browning from its milk sugars.

The step that matters

Cooking the thin pancake. The pan must be hot enough to set the batter quickly, and a very thin pancake is fragile, so it should be left unflipped until the surface has set and lightly browned.

Swap the apricot

The recipe marks apricot as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, flour, milk, butter, sugar, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, milk, butter, sugar, cream. 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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Buckwheat 148Rice 104French 71Cornmeal 65Potato 62Cream 36 See all 241 →

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