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Plain Pancakes

A simple batter of eggs, flour, milk, and salt, fried into pancakes and served with lemon juice and caster sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs well and stir into the flour until perfectly smooth.

  2. Add the salt and slowly mix in the milk until you have a smooth batter.

Cook and serve

  1. Heat a small frying pan and melt the butter in it.

  2. Pour just enough batter to cover the pan and fry until golden brown on one side.

  3. Sprinkle a few currants on top, flip, and fry the other side until golden.

  4. Roll the pancake and serve immediately with lemon juice and caster sugar.

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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as the pancake sets.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the thin pancake together when cooked.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter to a smooth, pourable consistency.
Butter
Greases the pan and adds flavour and help with browning the surface.

The step that matters

Pour just enough batter to cover the pan. A thin, even layer cooks through quickly and browns evenly; too much batter makes a thick pancake that stays raw in the middle and browns unevenly.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, lemon, 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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